


Burn

by engagemachine



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Age Difference, Angst, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Brainwashing, Child Abuse, Codependency, Coercion, Corporal Punishment, Dubious Consent, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Gaslighting, Humiliation, Hypnosis, Kidnapping, Manipulation, Mind Control, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Non-Consensual Touching, Spanking, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2020-11-15 08:09:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 8
Words: 102,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20862998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/engagemachine/pseuds/engagemachine
Summary: It was a pleasure to burn.





	1. Burn

_"If there is anything left to say, it is this:_  
_ I would have found you anywhere._  
_ I will find you anywhere."_

_—Venetta Octavia_

Everything is too loud and too dark; the bass thunders so hard she feels as though it throbs inside her like a second heart, pulsing somewhere low in her underbelly.

Taylor can’t remember why she had decided to come, only that Ashley Phillips—who had never spoken to her before this—had stopped her in the cafeteria and handed her a slip of college-ruled paper, something torn from somebody’s notebook in a hurry. An address.

“You should come,” she’d said, friendly and sweet. She had soft hair and pretty, straight teeth—one of the few lucky enough to forgo the necessity of braces. “This Friday, eight o’clock.” Taylor couldn’t think of any reason not to. She’d never been invited to a party before.

But as she wanders aimlessly through the dark, crowded home of some senior named Andrew, she quickly realizes how out of place she is, how much she stands out. Everyone is _way _older than her. She’s probably the only freshman here. Why did Ashley even invite her?

She combs her way through the living room. Her throat clogs with cigarette smoke and sweat and something girlish and cloying, like strawberry peach perfume, that cheap kind that comes in the plastic spray bottles. She wonders if maybe this is all some elaborate joke. Maybe they just wanted to see if she was dumb enough to even bother showing up. Maybe this is a prank and she’s too stupid to realize she’s the punchline.

She sinks her teeth into her lower lip and squeezes between throngs of junior and seniors, feeling out of place and small as everyone laughs and chugs back red Solo cups. She rubs her slick hands against the thighs of her jeans, jeans that don’t fit like the other girls’ do. She’d had to punch an extra hole in her belt just to hold them up. But she’d borrowed a shirt from Meredith’s dresser, something floral with puff sleeves, little buttons up the front. Her boobs don’t fill it out like Meredith’s do, but she supposes it doesn’t matter anyway; she hasn’t taken off her windbreaker yet.

She works her way into the kitchen where there’s chips and cans of beer sprawled on sand-colored countertops, like windblown trash scattered on the beach. There’s a happy, little man in an oversized chef’s hat on the countertop next to the toaster oven, holding an empty cardboard roll of paper towels in his outstretched hands. In big fancy script on the breadbox, _Let’s Eat!_, and a red and white striped dish towel hanging over the handle for the oven door. The kitchen screams of a woman’s touch—Andrew’s mom—and Taylor wonders suddenly how her own mother might have decorated, if their kitchen would’ve had a theme like this one. Wonders what it would have felt like to grow up with a pantry stocked full of food, all the time, or the privilege of satisfying those sweet-sleepy after-midnight cravings, slinking into the kitchen to spoon out some ice-cream, or a late-night bowl of cereal, something with a sugary crunch. 

The dining room table has been shoved against the wall to accommodate the crowd gathered around some kid doing a keg-stand, spurred by the raucous shouts of encouragement from his friends. He isn’t wearing a shirt. She thought that was only something people did in movies. She edges herself through the sliding glass doors and spills out onto the patio, where a few others have congregated as well. It’s quieter out here. Peaceful. There’s a group gathered around a small bonfire in the grass near the shed, lounging in plastic fold out chairs, like the ones you’d take camping, and others linger on the patio, smoking and drinking. There’s a couple near the edge of the patio, some guy with his tongue down Amelia Baker’s throat, his hands in the back pockets of her jeans. Taylor quickly looks away, embarrassed.

The air is chilly and cold, and she welcomes its sharp bite. The sky stretches out wide and black above her, blinking and alive with stars. She takes a moment to wonder at it, exhaling slowly, watching as her breath is carried away, into the night. She remembers in second grade in science class when she’d made her own starry night, a giant black piece of construction paper that she’d poked little tiny holes into with the tip of her pen, hundreds of them, and then holding the paper up to the ceiling, watching all the holes fill with artificial light. 

“Hey, pretty girl, glad you could make it.”

Taylor spins around and looks up at Ryan Henderson, a senior she’s passed in the halls at school a couple of times. She thinks he runs track and might have a couple of classes with Nathan.

“Hi,” she says, shyly. He’s never talked to her before. She didn’t even know he knew she existed. And he just called her _pretty_. 

“Seen you around at school. Taylor, right?”

She nods twice, bites her lower lip as she watches him approach the railing. He leans his side against it, casual and easy, and looks at her. He smells like spearmint gum and Axe body spray.

“I wasn’t sure if you were going to show.” When she pushes her brows together in confusion, her lips parting in some unspoken question, he fills in the gaps. “I told Ashley to invite you. Thought you’d be more likely to come if she asked.”

Taylor swallows. _Ryan_ wanted her to come? She flushes under his gaze, averts her eyes to the red, tripod grill in the corner of the patio, like she meant to look there.

Ryan laughs a little, and she is drawn back to him as he fishes a cigarette and lighter from the pocket of his jeans. He’s cute—tall—with wavy brown hair and pretty blue eyes. She knows a lot of girls who have crushes on him. He’s wearing a pine green sweatshirt—the three buttons at the top undone—that looks cozy and soft. She bets it smells like him.

He secures the cigarette between pink, bow-shaped lips and cups his hand around the opposite end as he lights it. It glows orange for a moment as he inhales, and then all the smoke is billowing out, swirling into the night, and there’s something strangely hypnotic about it, the rise and fall of his chest, the loose, easy way he holds the cigarette, and the glimmer in his eyes as he looks at her. He sees her eyeing his cigarette and holds it out to her after taking another drag.

“You want to try?”

“Oh, no.” Taylor shakes her head. She licks her lips, dry all the sudden. “Evelyn will kill me if I come home smelling like smoke….”

Ryan cocks his head. “Evelyn?”

“My foster mom,” she explains, regretting the words as soon as they leave her mouth. Stupid. She should have just said “my mom”, now he’ll think she’s some loser foster kid without real parents.

“Right.” Ryan exhales again, and she doesn’t miss the way his eyes sweep over her, up, down, and then up again. He takes one last drag of his cigarette, and then crushes it on the railing. Taylor frowns at this, because he just lit it. He flicks it away, so that it lands somewhere in the dark sea of grass.

“You want something to drink?” he asks.

“Oh, I—”

“Come on, I’ll get you something.” He straightens and clambers down the porch steps, and Taylor hesitates only briefly before following after him.

He leads her to the group lounging around a makeshift fire pit, which is little more than a ring of misshapen rocks. One of the boys is feeding small branches into the fire to keep it going, sitting on the edge of his chair, prodding at the fire with a stick. A girl in a miniskirt and leather jacket is curled up in the lap of who Taylor assumes is her boyfriend, and her legs look smooth and tan in the glow from the fire. Taylor looks around at the rest of them, a hodgepodge of teenage boys and a few other girls. She recognizes only some of them.

Ryan introduces her to them and then tells her everyone’s names even though she won’t remember them. He explains that some of them are from Ridgepoint, in Old Town. She gives them all a little wave which makes one of the boys snort and shoot Ryan a look that Taylor doesn’t know how to interpret. She folds her arms behind her back and doesn’t know what to do.

Ryan gestures for one of the guys to move so Taylor can have his chair. She mumbles her thanks as she takes his proffered seat, and Ryan plops beside her chair onto the hard ground, surrounded by dead clumps of grass. He’s almost the same height as her even though he’s on the ground and she’s in the chair.

The fire is warm and the smoke smells good, and she tries to allow herself to relax a little and not worry her bottom lip so much, even if there’s something comforting about laving her tongue over the indents her teeth have left on her lower lip. 

“Let’s get you something to drink,” Ryan says conspiratorially, leaning in, looking up into her eyes in a way that makes Taylor’s cheeks turn hot. One of the guys tosses him a white can which Ryan catches with one hand. The top pops open with a wet hiss. Taylor watches the gold lettering on the side glimmer in the firelight, like something forbidden, something dangerous.

“You ever had beer before?” he asks, and she shakes her head. “Ah, an alcohol virgin,” he says, knowingly, just a little too loudly for her comfort. Some of them chuckle, and Taylor sinks into her chair in a way she hopes isn’t obvious, blushing so hard, trying to ignore the prickle of unease slithering up her spine. She hates the way he said _virgin_, like her lack of foray into alcohol isn’t the only thing virgin about her. 

“Here.” He hands the can to her, and Taylor holds it with as few fingers as possible, as if it’s something that suddenly might grow fangs and sink razor sharp teeth into her. “Come on, honey, take a little sip,” he says, softly, so only she can hear.

She looks at him, his eyes dark in the firelight, and brings the can to her lips, tilting her head back to swallow. She grimaces as it slides down her throat, as the taste settles in her mouth, bitterness bleeding all over her tongue.

“_Eugh_,” she gags. It tastes nasty. She spits out her tongue and grimaces. “I don’t like that.” She holds the can out to him, but he pushes it back into her lap.

“The first taste is always kind of gross,” he says. “I have something that might make it go down a little easier.”

She frowns at him. “What is it?” Ryan reaches into his jacket and retrieves two little white pills, nestled in the palm of his hand. She cocks her head. “What are those?”

“They make everything feel better.” He reaches for her free hand and pushes them into her palm, and she instinctively closes her fingers over them so they don’t fall on the ground.

“I—I don’t know if I should,” she says, hesitant, meeting his gaze.

“I take them all the time. They’re really good.”

The fire crackles and pops, sparks shooting up into the dark expanse of open sky as one of the boys tosses a fresh log onto the fire. There’s the dimming of the flames as the existing fire crumbles beneath the new added weight, and then the burgeoning brightness as the flames lap at the wood, licking it up faster and faster, as if excited by the taste.

“How will they make the beer taste better?” she asks.

Ryan huffs, shifting closer to her. He seems a little agitated, having to explain. “They just do. They make everything taste good and everything else just feels… light.” Taylor still looks unconvinced, so he goes on. “It’ll help you loosen up a little. Make you happy.” He looks down at the ground for a moment, and she catches him biting his tongue. He fixes her with a smile when he looks back up. “I bet you’re real cute when you smile.”

Taylor exhales, caught in the ocean of his eyes. The moment feels hypercharged and heady, like it’s just the two of them here and no one else. She wants to know what it’s like to feel light, what it might be like to breathe with four sets of lungs instead of two, how it might feel to suddenly grow wings, the foreign sensation of needing to anchor herself to the ground before she floats up and away. The fantasy of flight.

She takes both of them at once, and because she can’t dry swallow, chases them down with a large gulp of beer.

She makes a face. “It still doesn’t taste good.”

Ryan laughs. Taylor likes the way his eyes crinkle at the corners when he does. “They don’t work instantly. Give it some time.”

So she does, or maybe she doesn’t at all. The night becomes an intangible thing, something distant and kind of faraway, like being in a dream, but knowing that you’re in one. Ryan was right—she does feel light, like cotton candy. She remembers laughing along with everyone about—about something, it doesn’t seem to matter now—only that everyone is smiling, and she is smiling too, and it’s nice, and the world takes on a warm, honeyed glaze. The edges of her vision are sticky sweet. It’s difficult to focus her gaze on any one thing for more than a few seconds. There’s the sagging pile of wood stacked against the side of the shed, the warm, dying frenzy of sparks from the fire, and when she tilts her head back to laugh, the starlit sky, a black, endless canopy. Ryan hands her more beer, and she drinks it. The letters on the side of the can swirl into golden spirals she can’t read. She’s lost track of how many she’s had. And she hardly notices the taste, after a while; she kind of likes the way it makes the back of her throat tingle, how hot it makes her belly feel. 

After a while, some of the group starts to thin out, people leaving in pairs of two. There’s only a couple of guys left now. She feels Ryan playing with her shoelaces, where he kneels at her feet. He looks up at her intently, and Taylor’s too dizzy to really meet his gaze head on.

“How are you feeling?”

She starts to reply but is interrupted by a hiccup. She giggles. “Really good.” Is she slurring? It’s hard to tell. She frowns a little and tries again. “Really—really good.”

“Yeah,” Ryan says. He licks his lips. “I thought you might.”

She thinks he says something about going inside, that it’s cold, and she doesn’t resist when he pulls her up from her chair. His arm around her back feels good—big and warm. She nuzzles into his sweatshirt, hears the sliding glass door open. He smells like spearmint gum. At some point, there’s stairs, but she doesn’t remember walking up them. Then, something soft beneath her, a fluffy cloud, or maybe a bed.

Everything is dark and warm. The bass is still thumping from downstairs, the walls vibrating from it, but she doesn’t mind it as much as before. Ryan slides up the bed alongside of her, and she feels his hands on her as he unzips her jacket, pulling her arms out of the sleeves. They flop lifelessly back onto the bed when he lets them go—that makes her giggle again.

“I feel like—a doll,” she slurs. Something in her hindbrain tells her this should be concerning, her lack of control over her own body mechanics, but she ignores it. Ryan is so big and warm next to her. She feels like taking a nap.

Hands on her again, this time fumbling with her belt, and then unbuttoning her jeans. She tries to sit up.

“Hey, what are—what are you doing?” Hard to sit up, her brain sloshing around inside her skull, too heavy to hold up for some reason.

“Just wanna touch you a little,” Ryan says, breathy, “Lay back. It’ll feel good.”

Taylor tries to do what he says, but she gasps when he slips his hand inside her jeans, cupping her through her underwear. She squirms beneath his touch, not sure if she likes it or not.

“Sh, sh, just relax,” he says. She feels one of his fingers probing _down there_, and she whimpers and arches away. Only Nathan’s ever touched her there.

“St—stop,” she says. Now she can hear her own voice, all shaky and slurry. “I don’t wanna… do that.” Why is it so hard to talk?

Ryan withdraws his hand and shifts so he’s straddling her, his weight settling over her hips. The pressure of him sets off a flicker of anxiety, a spark that catches, and for a moment it’s Nathan on top of her, pinning her to the mattress with just his weight, his hands all over her, breath on her nape, shoving her face first into the mattress, suffocating, mothballs and dust in her nostrils, his scratchy jeans on the backs of her thighs, sheets soaked with drool, the embarrassed shiver of her bedsprings, her mouth open in a silent cry—but then his lips and tongue on her neck, warm and wet, and Nathan’s never done _that_ to her. She sighs a little without really meaning to, turns her face into the bedspread to give Ryan a broader canvas. It kind of feels like being licked by a dog or something. Kind of tickles. She giggles a little and squeezes her eyes shut, where Christmas-colored phosphenes fizzle behind her lids.

“So fucking hot.” 

She doesn’t say anything, just lets him suck more bruises into her neck. No one’s ever kissed her like this before. She doesn’t know if she likes it or not. She feels his teeth skirt over her pulse and she jumps, hands blindly reaching for his shirt, balling the fabric into her fists. She feels him laugh, a puff of hot breath against her jaw.

She’s seen this in movies. Boys kissing girls. Sex. The way two bodies move together, easy and fluid, like they’d both done it a million times, even if it was only the first. But nothing about this feels easy, and all her sensations feel far away, like he’s touching her underwater. Her reactions are slowed—delayed—her mind and body operating at different speeds. 

Ryan shifts, lifting himself off her to kneel on either side of her thighs. He shucks her jeans down to her knees, and this time, when his hand slithers inside her underwear, something primal inside her claws to the surface, and she finds the strength to slap his arm away.

“What the hell,” he says.

“I—I don’t—want that,” she says again, trying to sit up. The room spins—there are three Ryans, and then two—and she puts a hand to her forehead as if to ease the pulsing there.

“What, you can put out for your big brother, but not for me?”

Taylor instantly recoils from him.

_How does he—? _

The repugnance in his voice wounds her, and she shrinks away, feebly pushing herself further up the bed. She feels so weak.

“Yeah, I know about that,” he sneers, “the whole fucking—”

Suddenly, the door bangs open, startling them both. Two people stumble in, a girl and a boy, limbs wrapped around each other, mouths occupied. The girl breaks away to giggle into the boy’s neck, and the boy steers them towards the bed.

Then, a sudden expletive of surprise at finding the room already occupied—“Oh, shit,”—and a half mumbled apology from the boy.

Ryan reaches above Taylor’s head and violently yanks a pillow out from underneath her, sending it careening towards the boy’s head.

“You _fucking _douchebag, do you knock?”

“Sorry, dude, didn’t realize anyone was in here....”

Taylor is already scrambling off the bed, horrified, sliding her jeans up past her thighs. Her fingers tremble over the button, and then the zipper.

“Jesus fuck,” the guys says suddenly, looking at Taylor, as if only just now seeing her for the first time. He looks at Ryan. “Dude, how old is she? Like, twelve?”

Ryan’s face flames, his nostrils flaring, but Taylor doesn’t notice. She doesn’t have time to do her belt, or to grab her jacket from where Ryan had pushed it to the floor. She stumbles out of the room, past the couple in the doorway, ignoring Ryan’s shouts. She almost falls down the stairwell, but somehow she makes it down in one piece, and then she is throwing open the front door, staggering down the wooden porch steps, the sidewalk. She breaks into a sprint, unsure of her destination, just needing to escape. Get away.

She doesn’t realize she is crying until she feels the bite of the cold wind on her wet cheeks. She hears her belt clink where it dangles around her thighs as she slows to a jog. She bends over on the sidewalk and puts her hands on her knees, panting for breath, in some residential area she doesn’t recognize, all the houses dimmed, stiff looking, the porch lights off. She wonders what time it is.

Her ears and throat burn from the cold. When she swallows, her saliva tastes coppery. She sniffles and tries to gather her bearings as she wanders along the sidewalk for a while, not sure what to do, or where to go. Her head is throbbing, and everything still feels dim and kind of faraway, like she is partway underwater or something.

It’s freezing without her jacket, and her bus pass was in the pocket—not that she could locate the nearest bus stop now. She wraps her arms around herself and keeps her head down to block out the cold, curling in on herself.

Behind her, a sudden beam of light. She turns to face the blinding flash of headlights head-on in the dark, bringing a hand up to her eyes to shield some of the light. A van pulls up alongside of her. Taylor’s heart lurches in her chest but she can’t run away. The van stalls, and she hears a door opening, and then a man walking around the front of the vehicle, looking at her.

“Jesus, kid. You’re just asking for it everywhere you go, aren’t you?”

She doesn’t recognize him at first, but after a long moment she heaves a sigh of relief at the familiar face. She knows he works for Mr. J. She’s seen him outside the hangar before.

He slides open the back door. “Get in.”

Taylor hesitates, not sure if she can trust him.

“Come on,” he says again, trying to soften some, but it’s only marginal. “He wants to see you.”

She crawls into the back of the van. When the door slides closed, she is submerged in cool darkness. The seats have been gutted, so she lies down on the floor and curls into a ball. The van rolls along. The streets are soft, empty. She stares for a long time out the two back windows, the tender, golden blur of the city at night, oranges and yellows interspersed by patches of darkness. She closes her eyes, feels the golden streetlamps curling over the back of her lids, and she pretends she is underwater, that the flickering light is the warmth of the sun breaking through the ocean’s surface.

It’s hard to keep her eyes open. She lets the vibrations of the van lull her to sleep.

\--

She wakes to the sound of voices. At first, she doesn’t remember where she is, and she strains to listen, even as her head throbs when she tries to lift it from the floor.

_“—drunk. She was wandering for a while.”_

_“Hm.” _

_“Took something, too. Think it was Ativan. She’s pretty out of it—”_

The voices draw closer, and then the door swings open, and it jars her as it slides all the way back, the loud bang it makes as it hits the bumper.

She looks up at the two figures through a drowsy haze. Her eyes widen.

“Mr. J,” she slurs, “I feel—feel funny.”

She tries to crawl out of the van, and somehow ends up on her hands and knees on the cold ground. She feels bile creeping up her throat, but she chases it back down with a shuddery exhale. Her palms and knees burn from the scrape of hard concrete.

She’s too weak to stand. She tries to lift her head, but the world caves in on itself. She rolls onto her side. It’s so dark outside. She stares at Mr. J’s approaching shoes instead.

His hands slide under her back and his other beneath her legs, picking her up, suddenly, like she’s weightless. She’s too weak to wrap her arms around his neck, and they hang limp, one pressed between her side and his abdomen, the other dangling uselessly.

“Anything else?” she hears.

“No,” Mr. J says. “Nothing else.” 

He carries her into the hangar. She is set down on something soft. The orange couch, she thinks. She nearly topples over, but she manages to right herself at the last second, giggling a little. Mr. J swims in front of her eyes, and she smiles at him, as if seeing him for the first time. She scoots to the edge of the couch and leans forward to sloppily throw her arms around his neck, where he’s crouched in front of her. 

“Mr. J!” she slurs. “I’m so, so—_hiccup_—happy to see you.”

She feels him stiffen, but he does not push her away. “You’re _drunk_.”

“Beer is _gross_!” she tells him, emphatic all of the sudden. She makes a “_yuck_” sound, and then she digs her fingers into the collar of his jacket a little, nuzzles herself right up into the crook of his neck, and she feels it when he swallows, the way his throat bobs. “I don’t like it,” she says. She lays her head down on his shoulder and sighs, but it comes out as a hiccup instead. She frowns into his shoulder, very serious, now. Thinking. “I don’t like parties.”

Mr. J hums. She feels him rest his forearms on the edge of the couch to steady himself, on either side of her thighs. She huffs into his neck. “I’m so sleepy.” As if only just now aware of this opportunity, she leans forward suddenly and blows a raspberry into his neck, where the side of his throat is just barely exposed behind the collar of his shirt.

He grunts and shoves her away. Stands. She lands on her side on the couch and giggles, hair tousled around her like a halo, looking up at him, her eyes glossy and bright. 

“Oops,” she giggles.

“Look at you,” he says after a moment, when her laughter has dissolved. “Always getting yourself into trouble.” He _tsks_, his voice heavy, laden with disappointment. “What am I going to _do_ with you?”

She sits up suddenly, worried. Her vision swims, and her stomach feels hollow all of the sudden. “Are you mad at me?” There is the prickle of tears in her eyes. She swallows something bulbous that’s formed in her throat, a fist of panic. “Please don’t be mad at me.”

Mr. J only stares at her, and she doesn’t resist when he lays a hand on her shoulder, gently pushing her to lie back down on the couch as he hovers over her. Three fingers on her jaw then, pushing it to the side, so her cheek is pressed against the cushions, her neck exposed to him. It’s all pale, thin skin. The blue whisper of a vulnerable, pulsing artery, all that stunning canvas of possibility. It awakens an old hunger in him—killing her. His original plan.

Funny, how far they’ve come since then.

“Who did that to you?”

He is tracing over the red-purple blotch on her neck, this indefinite shape. She instinctively reaches up to touch the skin too, and their fingers tangle on kiss-bruised skin. Her pulse jumps under their fingertips where they can both feel it.

“Ryan wanted to kiss me… but I didn’t want him to.”

“No?”

“I’ve never been kissed before,” she says, studying the frayed threads of the couch with the sort of manic concentration that only someone truly inebriated could possess. “I bet you kiss girls all the time!” she exclaims.

She hears him snort. “It just so happens I am _very_ picky,” he deadpans. 

“Oh,” Taylor says. She is staring up at the ceiling now, blinking. Her eyelids feel so heavy. “I’m picky too. I hate broccoli.”

“Mhm.”

“Can you sit down?” Taylor squints up at him, as if looking up at him from a telescope, like he’s a great distance away. “You’re making me dizzy.”

He humors her and does what she asks, mostly because she won’t remember any of this in the morning. He settles himself on the opposite end of the couch, and Taylor immediately sits up and scoots towards him. She has no qualms about making herself comfortable, laying her head down in his lap. Snuggling close. She clumsily jams an elbow into his ribs on accident but doesn’t seem to notice. She is as happy as a clam.

“I wish we could be like this all the time.”

He almost doesn’t hear her, how quietly she says it, the way the words are tethered to the back of a yawn. He takes it upon himself to touch a strand of her hair, and then several, slowly combing through it with his bare hands. It feels nice. Soft. Something about it feels stupidly indulgent.

“Mr. J?” she yawns. She takes his free arm and drapes it over her waist to use as a blanket. Her eyes are closed, the dark fan of her lashes pressed against her cheeks. “Do you love me?”

He hasn’t stopped looking at her from the moment she laid herself in his lap. Even after all this time, he is still fascinated by her unwavering trust in him, how freely she gives herself to him. The hand on her waist curls a little tighter.

“No,” he murmurs. He runs his fingers through her hair, carefully scrapes the smaller strands behind her ear, over and over again. “I don’t love you.” She yawns, a soft sound, and curls her legs closer to her chest for warmth. If his words have any effect on her, she does not let on. Her cheek is warm on his thigh. Her breathing evens out, the steady rise and fall of her chest. He curls a strand of her hair around his finger—which suddenly carries heavy, metaphorical significance. He used to think he had her wrapped his finger, wound so tightly she could never get free. But now he thinks it might be the other way around.

“I don’t love you at all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDITED 10/12/2020: This originally started off as an AU anthology series for JK, operating as a sort of "sequel" under the premise that Taylor had gone through with the events that were about to transpire at the end of JK. Since then, the story has become a lot more linear, and this is no longer an anthology series, although it does remain an AU sequel to JK. It's not necessary to read JK prior to reading Burn, but JK will provide you with more contextual background information if you read that first. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading. Comments are always welcome.


	2. Incinerate

_"You woke in me a feeling that annihilates any other. I feel you, and only you, inside."_

_—Vazakinada_

Sometimes he lets her sleep with him. She still sucks her thumb at night, to put herself to sleep, that unshakeable habit, a soothing maternal comfort, like a baby rooting for its mother’s nipple during midnight hours, milk drunk and sleepy. He remembers she was nursed for too long. “Mommy has to feed me,” she used to whine, petulant, even then, crossing her arms, practically a lifetime ago, only ever wanting warm milk, the only bitter sweetness she had ever known. But of course she was never weaned—her mother had nothing else to give her, not when there were other hungers to feed—addictions—the nicotine, the meth, dirty mouths that could never be sated no matter how much you fed them. Some people learned that the hard way. Some never learned at all.

He watches as she sleeps, curled up on her side, facing him, a streak of pale moonlight slicing across a bare shoulder, thumb hooked behind her teeth where it’s made itself a bed, nestled on top of her tongue. She always wakes to a wet spot of drool on her pillow, and he’s always gone before then, but he knows she’s embarrassed by her findings, crinkling her nose in that way that she does, flipping over the pillow to hide her shame, pretend like it’s not there.

Sometimes she has nightmares. Her whining always wakes him, and he listens to her whimper and cry, toss and turn and fist the sheets. Sometimes she seeks him out, as if he isn’t the sole reason for all her night terrors, curling herself towards him, burying her face into the crook of his neck. He always pushes her away, but somehow she gets her way, and inevitably in the morning when he wakes, she is wound around him like an octopus, limbs all tangled. Sometimes he’ll find that his arm is draped over her waist, and he wonders if she put it there. Sometimes she is spooned inside him, her smaller body tucked tight to his, her hot puffs of breath on his neck, or her back pressed to his chest, her ass snuggled against his lower abdomen, and sometimes he wakes up _hard_, and he rolls his eyes and shoves her back to her side of the bed and gets up.

Her side of the bed.

He’s not used to having another body to share a bed with.

They have an unspoken arrangement—a pretense—which is that she only slips into bed with him when he should already be immersed in a deep sleep. That is, _she _always seeks _him_ out, usually in the dead of night, once she’s restless with anxiety and unease and decided she can’t sleep alone, and he pretends like he doesn’t know she’s there until the morning, when he wakes.

They don’t talk about it, and when she comes to find him in the mornings, hair tousled, the faint imprint of a quilt mushed against her cheek, her teeth sunk into her bottom lip, she looks embarrassed and a little afraid, like maybe he’s finally going to come out and say it, the thing they don’t talk about. Maybe he’ll tell her he doesn’t want her sneaking into bed with him anymore, and wouldn’t that crush her little heart?

“Hi,” she says, shyly, _always _so shy, even after all this time they’ve spent together. Even after all the things they’ve done.

He turns around and grunts to acknowledge her presence, his mouth stuffed full of cereal. From behind the crinkled, water-stained pages of the _Gotham Gazette_, he watches her move around the small, U-shaped kitchen, popping a piece of bread into the toaster, retrieving a bowl, pouring herself a giant helping of whatever sugary, tooth-rotting junk he’d just poured for himself. It’s the only cereal he’ll eat. Everything else has raisins and steel cut oats or fucking dried, crunchy strawberries or whatever. Hates that shit.

Taylor splashes on some milk and then scrapes the bottom of the Skippy jar with a knife to slather her toast with. She joins him at the counter, hopping into the barstool next to him. One of the thin straps from her tank top slips down her shoulder, and she doesn’t notice, her feet swinging beneath the counter. A happy clam. She chews her toast and munches her cereal, and he can tell she is dancing to a song in her head from the rhythm of her bare feet, the way she moves her head.

She’s getting taller—bigger, too—but he still dwarfs her in size, even if her lanky, long limbs are eager to play catch up. One day she’ll sit at the counter and her legs will touch the floor—a thought that occurs straight out of left field, catching him off guard. 

She beams up at him suddenly, eyes wide and cheeks flushed, a paradigm of barely-contained excitement, “Do you know what today is, Mr. J?”

He lays down the paper. Pretends to think about it. “Hm… I haven’t the faintest,” he drawls. 

“It’s your birthday!” she exclaims. Her spoon clatters inside the empty bowl so she can splay her arms wide as if to say, “Surprise!” or “Isn’t that just_ great_?”

“My… what.”

“Your birthday!” she says again. “Well, not your _real_ birthday, ‘cause I don’t know when your real birthday is and you never told me… so I decided it would be today!”

When he doesn’t respond, Taylor’s smile falters, her eyebrows drawing together in concern. “That’s okay, isn’t it?” she asks in a small voice.

The Joker indulges her—as he so often does—and loops an arm around her shoulders, pulling her into him. Their chairs knock together, and she makes a noise of pleased surprise. “_Sure_, kiddo. It’s my birthday,” he agrees, then, suddenly greedy: “What’d you get me?”

“Aren’t you going to tell me how_ old_ you are first? I have to know so I can put the right number of candles on your birthday cake.”

He tongues at the inside of his cheek for a moment, tasting the comfort of familiar scar tissue, enjoying the way she is smiling up at him. Sunny. Happy. She is easier around him now, after Nathan. The first couple of months were painstaking. Molasses slow. She wouldn’t speak for months, passing through each day as if trapped inside a cloud, or weighed down by some invisible fog. He would force her to eat back then, help her bathe, _change_ her. She was practically comatose then—pissing her pants like a toddler, screaming in the middle of the night, crying out for a mother who had never loved her, who was long ago dead. He used to pin her down and choke her until she passed out, just to get her to stop screaming, to put a stop to the incessant ringing in his ears.

He used to think about killing her, too, revisiting that fantasy over and over again until the craving coiled somewhere low in his belly, until he was thrumming and white-hot with _want_, and then he would go to her, want bleeding into need, until he was practically blind with it. And then he’d find her bent over and crying, arms curled around her shins, the sound muffled by the wet hills of her kneecaps. Or sometimes she would be lying on the bed, curled in the fetal position, whimpering, and he would think, _you’re gonna put a wounded dog out of its misery? You’re gonna kill something that’s already dead?_

No, no.

No.

She doesn’t get to die. Not like that.

Taylor is fingering the strap of his suspenders, running her thumb over the patterned fabric. She looks up at him expectantly.

“Eighty-seven,” he drawls, and she pulls back from him, her nose crinkling with laughter.

“You’re not eighty-seven!” she exclaims, exasperated. “You’re just saying that because you want more birthday candles!”

“Yeah.”

She huffs, but isn’t deterred from the undertaking of this new task. “It’ll have to be a really big cake.”

“The biggest,” he agrees.

She bites her lip thoughtfully, “Okay,” she says. She slips off the barstool and then stands there, clasping her hands, where they hang down near her thighs. Her expression is full of dampened-down excitement when she looks at him, like she’s trying not to get her hopes up. “Seven o’clock, okay?” She bends to pick up her backpack beneath the counter, looking at him, slipping it over her shoulders.

“It’s a date.”

She blushes furiously and spares him a shy little smile, cast over her shoulder, before she is out the door.

He makes her go to school—not because he cares about the importance of higher education—or education in general, but because he has to get her out of his _hair _for a few hours. He can’t exactly have her trailing along at his heels while he crashes mob meetings and incites political riots and plays with _Batman_.

Also, Oswald would have a fucking field day. He can imagine that fat little bastard’s beady eyes sliding all over Taylor, his gaze oily and slick. He looks like the kind of dumb shit who’d have a thing for little girls, wants to be called _Mister _while some doe-eyed twelve year-old in knee-highs and pigtails shyly spreads her legs for him; then he’d beat her black and blue with his cane or an umbrella, and she’d cry and squeal, and he’d stop only when she begged him to. “_Please, mister, please,_” sniveling and snot-faced, and then he’d drop the offending weapon and give himself a good tug—once, twice, it wouldn’t take much—and spend himself over the glowing, red ladder-mark of welts on the back of her pale thighs.

Yeah, he’s _definitely_ the kind of gross shit that gets off on little girls, maybe a little differently than guys like Jervis Tetch do, but by a thin margin. Fucking creep.

He can imagine the scene now, Oswald looking, looking, and _looking_, like Taylor is something he’d like to swallow whole, and the Joker would know he was thinking about how he might proposition her when he found a way to get her alone.

It wasn’t exactly a well-kept secret, Cobblepot’s little sex ring—girls he could pimp out for a smooth 70/30 profit. The ring went mostly unbothered by the GCPD. There were bigger fish to fry—Oswald’s money laundering, for one—than chasing down women and girls who may or may not be directly involved with his more seedy operations. It was easy tracking down the women who consented to being a part of it—older women with addictions, women like Taylor’s dead mother, partaking in one nasty, grotesque need in order to fulfill another. It was the women who hadn’t consented—underage girls, usually—who were harder to find, little girls taken from bus stops and public restrooms, girls sneaking out after dark from their bedroom windows, lured to some discrete location, enticed by the promise of a date with a hunky, hunky senior who didn’t actually exist.

Anyway, Oswald would look, and the Joker would bleed red.

“Mind your own fucking _business_,” he’d hiss. 

“Oh, is that what you’re calling that?” his gaze would slide to Taylor. “Just business?” His breath would smell sour, like old milk. The stench of ammonia from a bad cigar clinging to him, his bald head sweaty and shining from the heat of the overhead lights.

The Joker’s hand would come down hard on the table separating them, where Oswald sits behind it like a fucking king. The impact would make both Taylor and Oswald jump. “Eyes up here, sweetheart.” He’d move to block Taylor from Oswald’s view, then he’d tsk. “You really know how to make a guy feel _objectified_, staring like that.” 

Oswald would look at him in that way that Oswald always does, that “we’re-not-finished-with-this-yet-but-for-now-I’ll-let-it-slide” way, but they’d go back to talking shop, and the Joker would close his hands into fists and splay them on the desk, using them to support his weight, but also effectively blocking Taylor from view. A friendly reminder that he’ll deck the rubbery, fat sonofabitch if his eyes start to wander again.

Oswald would take the punch if the Joker doled him one though, waving off his henchmen with one hand while he cradled his crooked nose with the other, _I’ll handle this one, boys,_ like he’s dealing with an errant toddler, only, the two of them both know who’s _really_ in charge; they both know who’d flop like a fish in the end, belly up and stinking, a swarm of buzzing flies eager to feast.

Keeping Taylor out of his business affairs isn’t for her protection. It’s for his sanity.

The door swings open suddenly, and she comes bounding in, her backpack bouncing behind her. She runs to him, breathless, and suddenly her arms are around his middle, enveloping him in a tight hug. She pulls back to look up at him.

“Happy birthday,” she says.

And then she’s racing back out the door again, and he thinks, _Christ_. Oswald _cannot _have her.

* * *

Emily Ferguson is talking about her vacation in Santa Eulalia again. They go every year for Christmas, and she always brings back little gifts for her friends, key chains with palm trees on them that say ‘Ibiza’, fridge magnets in the shape of flip-flops and beach chairs, or colorful sunglasses she had distributed to her friends in little cloth bags she had decorated herself. 

Taylor wonders what it would feel like to be the recipient of those gifts—what it must feel like to have a friend who thought enough about you to want to bring you back a present from her lavish vacation, the way she must have tucked each item into her suitcase with care, imagining the look on each of her friends’ faces as she gave them their gifts.

Emily’s dad is an ER doctor at Gotham General, so she knows all the juicy gossip that goes on there, like when Rebecca Baughn had to get her stomach pumped, or Kacy Hartsell’s mom had to be admitted for five days because she’d swallowed a bunch of Oxy and tried to kill herself. In the cafeteria, at lunch, she regularly fills her friends in on all the sordid details, whispering to them all the things she’d overhead her dad tell her mom when they assumed she wasn’t listening.

But Taylor and Emily are not friends, and Taylor stares longingly over her shoulder for a moment, looking at the group of girls sitting behind her, all huddled close together, gossiping and munching on snacks.

There’s four of them in total. Becca has bright red hair and is covered in thick patches of freckles from head to toe. She still plays with dolls and has softball practice every day after school. Her mom always packs her Scooby Doo gummy snacks in her lunch bag, which everyone teases her about, like she’s still five or something. Katie’s the youngest, with yellow hair that she always wears in two smooth French braids that trail down her back. She’s an only child and her parents are divorced, so she lives with her mom. She is the prettiest one, with a button nose and a metal-free smile. She is carefree and sweet and dare devilish all at once. Katie has a boyfriend, too—Michael—and through careful eavesdropping, Taylor has learned Emily is incredibly jealous of this recent development.

Logan is Emily’s right hand. She is bossy and fierce—the most boyish of the group, and the tallest, too—somehow able to maintain her status within their inner circle without sacrificing her individuality. It might help that she and Emily have known each other for the longest, the pair having met in kindergarten; even then she went by Logan instead of Leah, the name given to her by her parents. Sometimes her birth name became a weapon in the hands of her friends, like when Logan was being goofy or annoying and Emily would snap, “Cut it out, _Leah_,” and Logan would snarl but stop whatever she was doing. Walk away until she had cooled down.

Logan has long, shiny brown hair—pin straight—which she pairs with rugged combat boots and acid-wash jeans. Taylor likes it best when she wears her baseball hat; she likes to pull it low over her eyes, and whenever someone speaks to her, she lifts her head up to see beyond the rim of the visor and narrows her eyes, like she’s squinting at the sun. Sometimes she’ll wear her older brother’s t-shirts, and nobody says anything. She exists as a fascinating paradox, a series of beautiful contradictions. Sensible but reckless, very good at listening, but too loud. Observant when she wants to be, but sometimes a little obtuse. Too tomboyish for her friend group, but still the unspoken right hand, still calling all the shots when Emily will let her. She’s on the softball team with Becca, too, and sometimes after school, Taylor will sit out on the bleachers under the scorching sun—notebooks piled neatly on her lap, pretending to study—while she watches them practice.

They have a class together, too. History. One time she asked if she could borrow Taylor’s pencil, and it was Taylor’s only one, but she said yes and used a pen for the rest of the class instead. And another time Logan groaned, “This test kicked my ass,” as she handed her test booklet to Taylor to be passed to the front of the class along with everyone else’s. Taylor said, “Me too,” and then felt all kinds of warm for the rest of the day, elated that Logan had actually spoken to her. Sometimes she kicked the back of Taylor’s chair on accident, and she’d murmur ‘sorry’ and go to bouncing her knee beneath the desk instead. Taylor could always feel the vibrations of her, this girl who could never sit still.

Logan stood up to people, too. Bullies, older kids, and even teachers, sometimes, if the situation warranted it. That was what Taylor admired about her the most. She was a fighter. She was brave. She didn’t take no for answer. She wrestled with boys. She defended herself, and she spoke up for the underdogs who couldn’t do it themselves.

Taylor bites her lip and stares at her from over her shoulder, trying to be discrete about it. She is confused by this attraction, this strange, quiet longing that has blossomed slowly over time into a cornucopia of flowers and vines, weaving in and out of her heart valves, wildflowers nesting in the bases of her lungs, Queen Anne’s lace and larkspur, a tangle of daisies and sweet goldenrod sprouting up from her inferior vena cava. A bouquet of aster and forget-me-nots nestled in her throat. A heaviness she bears all the time. The line between wanting to be friends with Logan and perhaps just wanting to _be_ Logan is tenuous and thin, and she often conflates the two until they converge into one indefinite shape, the two thoughts fused so tightly together she cannot pull them apart.

She thinks about the way Logan swallows her friends in big bear hugs, coming up behind them and wrapping her arms around them until they squeal and push her away. Or the way she folds her arms across her chest and slumps in her seat in history class, hat lowered over her eyes, the kind of tiredness that originates from sheer boredom, the irritating inability to be outdoors in the sun, forced to be cooped up in a freezing classroom all day instead. Maybe the easy way she grins, or the way she laughs with her whole body, so loud, hands on her stomach, like she just can’t hold it in. Or that time Becca fell and scraped up her face real bad at softball practice, and Logan sat on the bleachers next to her and rubbed her back while Becca cried.

Maybe she doesn’t want to be_ just_ friends with Logan.

The bell rings. Taylor quickly spins around and keeps her head down as everyone shuffles out of the cafeteria. The sound of zipping backpacks, the metal clank of silverware, leftovers being dumped in the trash. The plastic clatter of empty trays as they’re stacked haphazardly on top of the rack over the trash.

Taylor keeps her head bowed but watches Emily carefully. She never eats the lunch her mom packs for her— a mustard and turkey sandwich with lettuce, tomato, and cheese; the only part she eats is the tomato. She heard Macy Windfall say that Emily was _anorexic_, a dirty word whispered in the locker room one time to her friends, when they were all changing after soccer. Taylor quickly looked away. Pretended that she hadn’t heard. It felt too intimate of a secret to know, too taboo, like finding out that Mr. Branson from her social studies class was into kiddie porn, only, the whole school found out before he even knew his secret had been discovered, and when the police came to escort him from the classroom, the only person surprised was him.

She doesn’t really know what anorexia means, just that it sounds bad, it _is _bad. She knows Emily eats the celery sticks her mom packs for her—something about celery being negative in calories because you burn off what you chew—but she never touches the peanut butter her mom always put in a little plastic disposable cup for her, like the little condiment cups they put ketchup in at McDonald’s and stuff. 

It always makes her late for her next class, but she has to wait until everyone’s cleared out of the cafeteria before she can get up. She is slow to shoulder her backpack, climb out from the picnic-table style seating.

She finds Emily’s leftovers without having to dig too deep. The worst days are the ones where Emily doesn’t rewrap her sandwich before throwing it in the trash, and Taylor has to wipe off the leftover sludge from someone’s half-eaten sloppy joe, or try her best to scrape off coleslaw mixed with burnt mac and cheese.

Today, her sandwich is wrapped, and she even finds the discarded cup of peanut butter. She wolfs down the sandwich first, then scoops a glob of peanut butter out of the cup with two fingers, feeling both greedy and embarrassed as she sucks her fingers clean. She feels feral as her gaze darts around the empty room, making sure there is no one to witness her display. She wipes her hands on her jeans, and then she is off to class, shuffling through empty halls, hoping she doesn’t run into a teacher.

Sometimes if she hurries, she can make it to class while everyone is still unpacking their backpacks, getting their notebooks and pencils ready, and Taylor can sneak in unnoticed, and only a few people will turn to look at her instead of the enormous and too-heavy gaze of the whole classroom.

Mrs. Lundhaven always eyes her when Taylor comes in, wiping leftover crumbs from her mouth with the back of her arm, but Mrs. Lundhaven never says anything, never berates her or writes tardy slips, just lets her slip into the classroom unannounced. Taylor is grateful.

She avoids eye contact with Logan as she slides into her seat, afraid that if she were to look, Logan might know what she’d done, might find her disgusting or gross. She slithers into her seat, trying to draw as little attention to herself as possible.

Mrs. Lundhaven writes WARSAW PACT - 1955 on the chalkboard when the door to the classroom unceremoniously bursts open. It’s a teacher Taylor has seen before but doesn’t know the name of.

“Deborah,” she says, breathless, “channel four.” She gulps in desperate lungfuls of air as Mrs. Lundhaven reaches into her desk drawer for the remote.

Everyone directs their worried gazes to the small TV mounted to the ceiling in the corner—the one they watch movies on when there’s a substitute.

“—receiving preliminary reports that a bomb has just gone off at Gotham State University. It appears the device has been detonated near the South campus, where we have received reports of at least two confirmed deaths. No word yet on what is purported to be the motive for the attack, but according to eye witnesses at the scene, the Joker is thought to be involved. All schools are being asked to evacuate at this time. If you have any further information—

Mrs. Lundhaven’s face is pale, but she springs immediately to action. “All right people, you know the drill, let’s MOVE.” She is ushering everyone out of the classroom, urging them to leave their backpacks, there’s no time. Everyone stands. Taylor does, too, but she is rooted to her spot when they flash a photo of Mr. J across the screen. She swallows.

“Oh, my God.” Taylor rips her gaze away from the TV, turning to look at Logan, who is standing next to her, mouth agape, eyes glued to the screen. “My brother goes to GSU.” It’s the first time Taylor’s ever seen her look afraid. She’s so pale, all the color drained from her face. Taylor’s heart convulses desperately in her chest, like it’s going to cave in. She opens her mouth to say something—some words of comfort, a heartfelt condolence, anything—but nothing will come out. Her throat fills with sand. She tries again, and again, but the sand keeps coming, filling up her lungs now, so she can’t breathe. “I have to go,” Logan says, to no one in particular, and Taylor watches helplessly as she hurries away.

Her eyes dart to the TV where the words ‘JOKER ATTACK’ are printed menacingly across a red ribbon at the bottom of the screen, written in big, fat block text. They’re in a helicopter now, showing aerial footage of the wreckage, massive plumes of thick smoke, falling debris, a rainstorm of black ash and dust; the shock of a nearby red firetruck, surveying the damage. She is hypnotized by the destruction, the hairs on her arms all standing at attention. Around her, panic unravels, a flurry of activity and worried chatter, but all she hears is a sharp ringing in her ears.

She’s cold, suddenly, and standing in snow that comes up to her knees. She watches from a distance as the whole city bursts into a firestorm of color, a riot of red and orange. The force of the explosion knocks her back against the car. The heat of the flames makes her eyes water and her face burn. It takes her a moment to regain her strength. A trickle of blood slides down her face, and she tongues at her upper lip, tasting copper. A whine of sirens and police cars, but they all sound far away. She collapses into the snow, but is horrified to find that it’s bloodstained. She looks back up, cold wind biting at her cheeks. It’s just started to snow. The whole city is black from the power outage, and the skyline burns red. Her mouth opens in a cry, but no sound will come. Somewhere, Mr. J is laughing that sharp, shrill hyena laugh that makes her blood curdle. She combs through the snow to find him, keeps calling his name, over and over again until her throat is raw from it, but it’s like he can’t hear her. He keeps laughing, and when she finds him, head bowed to the snow, bloodied, hunched over on his knees, his whole body warped and convulsing from the force of his laughter, Taylor is _terrified_. 

“Taylor. TAYLOR!”

Her eyes snap to Mrs. Lundhaven, who is standing near the door. She quickly looks around, realizes they’re the only two people left in the room. “Come on, hurry up!”

Taylor grabs her backpack, and Mrs. Lundhaven guides her out of the classroom with a hand on her back. Her teacher’s flats tap noisily against the floor as she hurries Taylor along through the bustling hallway. 

There must be something worrying about whatever expression is written all over Taylor’s face, because Mrs. Lundhaven escorts her all the way outside to the front of the school even though she doesn’t have to, even though it’s chaotic, everyone moving and converging to the front entrance of the school, trying to get out of the building all at once.

It’s a cool, sunny day. Bright blue sky, cloudless, the trees are red and gold. Leaves scrape and skitter against the concrete. The wind is cool. There was supposed to be a football game tonight, Raiders vs. Panthers.

Mrs. Lundhaven is surveying the unfolding scene, the parade of buses lined up alongside the curb, everyone clamoring in, two, three at a time. Her brows knitted together in concern. Taylor can see the gears turning behind her eyes. They’ve prepared for things like this—disaster training, active-shooter drills, bomb threat scenarios—she can see her desperately trying to recall all of that training now, the protocol, but nothing ever happens like it’s supposed to. There aren’t supposed to be parents lining up outside the school creating a mini traffic jam in their cars, preventing the busses from getting out. There isn’t supposed to be shouting and crying and police officers yelling and honking horns. There isn’t supposed to be overcrowded busses when there are seats for everyone. It isn’t supposed to be chaotic.

“Will your mom come pick you up?” she asks, her eyebrows still pushed together in concern, already thinking five steps ahead. “Is she out there?” she nods to the traffic, the worried parents trying to locate their children. Kids weaving in and out of the traffic, creating even more of a mess as the police try to push them back towards the buses. 

Taylor shakes her head no.

No, her mom will not be coming for her. No one will.

Mrs. Lundhaven looks down at her, the sun hot on her face, and for the first time, Taylor notices how young she is—the lack of worry lines or wrinkles, her eyes blue and clear, her hair still its natural color. The slightest hint of a rounded belly, like maybe she might be pregnant with her first child but hasn’t told anybody yet. So young, maybe she even went to GSU. Maybe she knows professors and other students there. Maybe she’s wondering, horrified, if the two confirmed deaths are anybody she knows. 

Her teacher walks her to the buses, quickly. Her palm is slick when she puts it on Taylor’s shoulder. “Will you be alright?”

Her concern touches Taylor differently than it ever has before. Maybe because for the first time, Taylor feels responsible for everything that is transpiring right now, a weight she has never had to bear. Not like this. Her heart is all jammed up in her throat all the sudden. She feels like she might puke it out, and she thinks, _good_. She doesn’t want it anymore. She doesn’t want to feel_ this_.

She gets on the bus. Stands somewhere near the back. The bus vibrates and buzzes with everyone’s loud chatter, everyone pulling up videos on their phone of the explosion. It’s loud, and too crowded. There’s fear, and there’s also arrogance; “At least we get out of school early,” she hears some boy say, and his friends laugh. Taylor feels nauseous. This isn’t her usual bus. She doesn’t know any of these kids. 

The bus takes them to a location that only parents are supposed to know about—it changes every couple of months, for their safety. This time it’s an overnight parking lot for commuters. It’s close to the train station, and luckily her train pass doesn’t expire until tomorrow. The train dumps her onto Walton Street, and from there it’s a twenty minute walk to home.

Home.

She bursts through the door and runs straight to the bathroom, puking up the contents of her measly lunch all over the yellow-stained toilet bowl. She grips the toilet seat with both hands, panting. The gross upheaval does nothing for her nerves, and when she can work up the strength to stand, she flushes the toilet and rinses out her mouth with sink water, washes her hands. She uses the hand towel to pat her face dry and thinks about how it smells like greasepaint. How it smells like Mr. J.

She turns on the TV in the living room. It’s old, one of those TVs with the bunny ear antennas you have to position just so, and the screen is cracked, but it’s still useable. She kneels in front of the TV and flips through the channels using the buttons on the front. There is no remote. She stops on the first news station that comes up, and then she’s watching the footage in real time. Twenty confirmed deaths now, and not one explosion, but two.

They all still think it’s the Joker, and she has to swallow and digest the horrifying possibility that maybe it is.

She knows he does bad things, that he _is_ bad. But he tells her that everyone is, that nobody in this world is good, that everyone only cares about themselves. Tells her that it’s a dog-eat-dog-world, that people will eat each other alive in a crisis just to save their own skins. He tells her that people are pathetic, easily manipulated, coercible. He tells her the world is cesspool, and people are fake—disingenuous—and he is simply showing everyone their _true colors_, like he’s an artist with the whole city as his canvas. 

She wonders if he’ll ever get tired of wanting to paint the same thing. But does an artist with an underlying desire, a need, ever tire of its muse?

It sickens her to think she is in love with a _leviathan_. That she can love a monster, someone capable of causing so much hurt, so much unadulterated cruelty and suffering. Seeing the panic and worry on everyone’s faces at school—seeing _Logan _looking so scared, for the first time ever, a girl who has only ever been brave in her life, always so fierce, moving with all the pulverizing force of a hurricane, suddenly reduced to terror at the thought of losing her brother to the hands of the Joker.

The Joker. Her _Mr. J_. The only person who has ever given a _shit _about her in her entire life. Was she wrong to want him this whole time? Hasn’t he fed her nothing but lies, like the terrible truth about Nathan, that he had orchestrated the whole thing, conducted this monstrous symphony from beginning to end?

She turns off the TV. No. No, she can’t start thinking like that. She can’t _villainize_ him. He is all that she has. She is nothing without him. She exists only in the warmth of his shadow. Without him, she is nothing. He chose her. He _saved _her from herself. He planted all her seeds, and then he allowed her to grow, watering her soil, tending to her like she was a secret garden, allowing her the freedom to blossom. Allowing her the freedom of choice, unshackling her from the illusion of society. Reality.

The only reality is her and him. She knows that now. She _knows_ it. 

She wipes her tears away with the back of her hand. There isn’t any reason to get all worked up. Everything will be fine. She can go back to how things were before. He can have her trust, pure and unfiltered. He can have her undying loyalty. He can have it all. She would give that to him. She _has _given that to him.

She tongues at her upper lip, where she can taste the salty brine of her tears.

She feels stupid for doubting him. And she’s wasted all this time—she has a birthday to set up for.

Taylor starts on the cake first. She had bought chocolate cake mix a couple of weeks ago in preparation, with the weekly allowance Mr. J had given her for school lunch. She’d been saving it for months.

Chocolate cake with chocolate frosting—and rainbow sprinkles—but those were mostly for her, because she loved sprinkles and she didn’t think he’d mind.

She measures and mixes all the ingredients together carefully before pouring it into the pan and setting it on the middle rack in the oven. She sets to decorating next. She’d bought a whole pack of streamers and birthday things, candles and kazoos and balloons. Everything’s pink and yellow because it’s the clearance leftovers from Easter, but it was all she could afford.

She uses duct tape to hold up the streamers—and she puts them everywhere. She uses the stool from the counter to drape them from the doorway, that way Mr. J will walk right into them as soon as he steps in. And she hangs them like bunting in the windows and open doorways. She creates a spiral of color around the chair legs. She spends the most time creating his Happy Birthday banner, making big bubble letters she goes back to fill in with the Crayola markers she borrowed from school. When the markers run out of ink, she switches to her colored pencils, which she’s practically worn down to the nub. She hangs up the banner in the TV room, above the couch.

She feels a little nauseous as she decorates, thinking about the explosion and all the confirmed deaths, thinking about Logan, hoping that her brother is okay. She forces those thoughts away and tries to focus on Mr. J instead, how surprised he’s going to look when he sees all of this.

She takes the cake out of the oven when the timer goes off, and then she blows up some balloons while she waits for it to cool. When she’s finished, she slathers on a thick layer of chocolate icing and dumps too many rainbow sprinkles on top. And then she meticulously counts out eight-seven little red candles—Mr. J will think that’s funny, her putting those many candles on it—counting twice just to make sure she gets the number right. She sets the cake on the counter and has a box of matches nearby so she’ll be ready when he comes home.

Then she waits. It’s six thirty, so he should be home in half an hour. She sits on the barstool in front of the counter and thinks about how she’ll greet him when he comes home. Maybe she should hide behind the counter and jump out and surprise him? Or maybe she could listen by the door and when she hears him coming up the stairs, she could start lighting the candles on the cake, so they’ll all be ready and glowing when he walks in?

Six thirty turns into seven, and then seven thirty, and then eight. She paces around the living room, gently kicking the balloons around, watching them float lazily back down to the floor. She checks and then double checks the streamers, the banner, making sure everything is perfect. She sucks and chews on the pipe end of a kazoo until the cardboard is soaking wet and she has to throw it away. She uses the spatula to scrape the leftover cake batter from the bowl until it’s nearly clean. Then she does the same with the frosting container, getting chocolate all over her lips.

She falls asleep like that, curled up on the couch with the spatula and the chocolate frosting container clutched in her hands.

* * *

When she wakes up, everything is dark. She startles, bolting upright.

She stumbles off the couch and finds the light in the kitchen, flicking it on. She squints against the brightness. The clock on the stove reads 11:08. Everything in the kitchen is just as she left it.

Mr. J isn’t home.

Taylor’s shoulders slump, and suddenly angry tears are burning behind her eyes. He’s late. He’s four hours _late_.

At first she feels anger, and then as she turns off the light and stomps to her bedroom, she feels shame. Disgust. She feels dumb suddenly for thinking that she loves him—for thinking that he might love _her_—that he was looking forward to his birthday party. Is she really that delusional? That _stupid_?

She doesn’t change out of her clothes. Falls asleep on top of the covers with her jeans still on, hugging her pillow, smearing it with her tears and snot. She cries herself to sleep, but that’s nothing new.

She wakes to the sound of the door slamming shut, violent and sudden, like a gunshot. She jolts upright, panting. Her room is still dark, though a light from the kitchen filters in from underneath her door. It’s freezing. She slides out of bed and finds a hoodie on the floor, slips it on over her head and ties her hair into a pony tail. There’s banging in the kitchen, the sound of cupboards open and closing, the loud, suctioned pop of the fridge.

She opens the door slowly. Mr. J is making a lot of noise. She shuffles into the kitchen, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, and then she sees him.

He looks _big_.

He always looks big, but there’s something about seeing him in his purple suit that makes his shoulders look broader—wider—and makes him appear as if he takes up more space than he actually does. His back is to her as he works at something on the counter, and she hesitates at the sheer bulk of him.

But the longer she waits and stares, waits and stares, the angrier she becomes. He won’t _look _at her.

She crosses her arms and angrily stomps her foot hard against the hardwood floor, and Mr. J spins around. _Finally_ she has his attention.

The shock of his painted face startles her for a moment, and her arms loosen, her face going a little slack from surprise, but then he breaks into a grin, and she straightens her shoulders, resuming her power stance.

“Well, _there_ you are,” he croons, “I was beginning to think you’d forgotten about my _party_.”

Taylor is fuming. She can feel her nostrils flaring. She imagines steam coming out of her ears, like she saw in a movie once. “I didn’t forget!” she snaps. Her arms are still crossed, and she digs her fingernails into the flesh of her upper arms until it stings, but she doesn’t stop. “You’re late!”

“Sweetheart,” he says, moving slowly across the room, towards her. “_Honey_.” When he comes out from behind the counter, his whole body in full view, Taylor swallows and feels her resolve falter. Her arms loosen, starting to unfold, and as he slinks closer, predatory and slow, head tilted, his eyes fire-dark, her arms instinctively drop to her sides. Her throat is sandpaper dry. Her shoulders draw up to her ears, and she clenches her hands into fists. Afraid.

He stops in front of her, and she can smell him, the overwhelming stench of smoke and gasoline and sweat, that heady but familiar musk. He blocks the light from the kitchen, and it fans out all around him instead, like he’s illuminated in a full body halo. She swallows as she looks up at him. She wants to be angry with him, but it’s hard when she’s paralyzed, caught in a stranglehold of fear. She feels suffocated by his presence, the heat and energy radiating off him, an energy that she recognizes as _fresh from a kill_. He’s still juiced, riding that electric current of adrenaline as high as it will go.

“I had a prior _engagement_,” he drawls, “it ran a little… over schedule.” He tilts his head, looking down at her. When he reaches up to touch her cheek, she flinches. She can’t help it. He strokes his thumb along her cheek, the line of her jaw. It feels hot and wet against her skin. “I had no _control_ over it,” he says. “They practically held me hostage!” He changes his tone then, lowering his voice, looking at her with his lids lowered. His eyes dark and searching. “You wouldn’t be angry at your Mr. J on his birthday now, would you?”

She swallows again, suddenly overcome with guilt. “No…” she murmurs, lowering her eyes.

He slips his thumb beneath her chin, tilting it up so can meet his gaze. “I _like_ the decorations, by the way.”

Tears burn at her eyes again, and will she ever stop crying? How is there this much water inside of her?

He lets go of her chin and she reaches up to wipe her tears away with the back of her arm, feeling stupid for crying in front of him. Feeling stupid for being so angry with him. It wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t help it.

She sniffles and attempts a feeble smile. “Wanna eat your cake now?” she asks.

“You bet I do, doll face.” He reaches around to tug on her ponytail, playful, and he gets a smile out of her. 

It’s still on the counter where she left it, all the candles still intact, and Mr. J waits patiently while she lights them all. She feels self-conscious of his gaze on her like this as she lights each candle, lighting match after match. But he waits, even when the wax starts to melt and drip onto the chocolatey bed of icing beneath it. When she’s all finished, and every candle is lit, she hops off the stool and hurries to flick off the light, submerging them in darkness.

The cake glows on the countertop, all golden and warm. She sits next to Mr. J as he lowers his face to the candles.

“You gonna help me blow these out or what?”

She nods at him, biting her lip, excited that he asked.

When he draws back, all dramatic, sucking in air, she lurches forward, drawing up her hands.

“Wait!”

He pauses to look at her, his chest deflating.

“You have to make a wish first.”

He grins, then. His eyes are so dark. “Don’t need to.”

He blows out the candles, and she helps, but she makes a wish for both of them first, something secret and beautiful. She’ll never tell. Then the wish won’t come true.

Later that night—or morning, rather—as she gets ready for bed, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She startles at the dried trail of blood on her cheek, her jaw, her chin—the size of a thumb, all the places where the Joker had touched her.

Her fingers tremble when she reaches up to touch her cheek, staring at herself in the mirror as she does it. Her mouth parts, and she exhales at the dried, tacky texture beneath the pads of her fingers. It is not an unfamiliar sensation.

She tilts her head up and to the side. Mr. J had traced an ‘X’ with his thumb over her pulse.

She swallows, backing away from the mirror, stumbling into the bathroom door.

She wonders whose blood that is.

She wonders if it belongs to Logan’s brother. 


	3. Scorch

"_I drag my extinction in search of you."_

—_Li-Young Lee_

He hears her before he sees her, the sound of the car door slamming, stopping him in his tracks, and for some reason he knows it's her, even without having to turn around. His mouth sets in a rigid line, his jaw suddenly taut, and he thinks, _son of a bitch._

He's going to fucking _kill_ her.

He drags her away from the car, into the crack of shaded darkness that two buildings slapped together side by side have created. He grabs a fistful of her hair, has her up against a wall before she even has a chance to explain. He doesn't want to hear her talk. The concrete slab of building scrapes against her lower back, where her shirt has ridden up. He has both hands curled tight around her throat, and his blood runs hot at the raw familiarity of it. Her pulse jumping desperately beneath his fingertips, her eyes bugged out, face blotchy and red.

"Please," she chokes. Her fingernails scrape against his hands, clawing at him, but he can't stop.

He can't stop.

The tips of her toes scrabble desperately for purchase, for ground, but he holds her just high enough that she can't have it. He watches her go from pink to pale, the rapid fluttering of her eyelids, like the mad flurry of hummingbird wings, and he takes a long moment to study the pale, blue veins pressed against the backs of her lids, skin that is milky and thin. He imagines if he squeezed with enough force, those veins might burst, and she'd weep blood that is cool, cornflower blue. He'd touch it with his fingers and smear it over her cheeks—reverent—like a burial ritual, and the last person to touch her, to leave a mark on her, would be him.

He feels her weakening beneath his grip, consciousness fading, and only when he is on the verge of losing her does he finally let go.

She sinks to the concrete on hands and knees, gasping for air, sucking it in in that desperate, choking way that isn't pretty. She can't say anything, can't do anything but try to fill her lungs with air, and he thinks, _good_. _Lie there_. _Know that only I get to decide whether you live or die._

He circles her, mouth pulled into a deep frown. Disgusted. "I should put you _down_," he tells her, "for that stunt you pulled. You do that again and I _will_ put you down." He grabs her by the back of her neck, bending down to snarl in her ear. "I will take you out back and _shoot_ you." He means it as an insult. Guns are impersonal. Too quick. He shoots people he doesn't care about, people that don't deserve a narrative in his story. He will finish her off as if she meant nothing to him. A bullet will rip through her skull and then he'll leave her out to rot, let her body decompose where it lies, let the animals drag it off, rip her open to the bone, until eventually those are chewed up and devoured, too. Nobody will miss her. Nobody will care.

"Mr. J," she croaks. He likes the sound of her voice like that. Broken and cracked, a little guttural. Likes knowing he made her that way, knowing that her neck will blossom with color, singing of his cruelty, a tight collar of purpling bruises.

"I just—I just wanted to see," she gasps, still breathless.

"You don't get to see," he snarls. "I told you to _stay_." He circles around to her other side as she starts to get up, and his mouth twitches, frown deepening, and he forces her back down to the concrete with his heel on her back, pushing hard. She collapses under the sudden weight, forced onto her belly with a sharp exhale. "You have been a _very_ bad girl."

"I'm sorry." She is really crying now—snot, tears, choked whimpering—the works. He runs his tongue along his lower rows of his teeth, tracing at the Y-shaped scar on his lower lip from the inside. He looks at her.

"Are you? Are you really _sorry_?" He digs his heel into her lower back and watches her flinch, try to twist away. "How sorry are you?"

"I'll never do it again," she sobs. "Please, I'll never do it again. I _promise_."

The Joker hums, unconvinced. He keeps the weight of his foot on her as he reaches into slacks, checks his pocket watch for the time. He's disappointed to have to end this now, not when her compliancy is something he tastes on his tongue, both rotten and sweet. He is practically frothing at the mouth, in ravenous want of her subjugation, but if he doesn't stop now, he's going to be late.

"Listen to me carefully." He pauses when she doesn't say anything, and then he leans down to grab her by the back of the neck again. He's always liked the feel of her spine cradled in his palm. "Do I have your attention?" She nods quickly, unable to speak. He murmurs directly into the shell of her ear, watching the delicious ripple of goose bumps explode across her skin from just his breath on her ear. The power of his voice. "You're going to go back to the car. You're going to get in the backseat. You're going to lock the doors. You're going to buckle your seatbelt like a _good girl_, and then you're going to sit there and wait until I'mdone. You're not going to move an inch until I say you can." He pauses, just to take a moment to image it. "Are we crystal clear?"

She nods again, and after a moment, he lets her up. She pulls herself up onto her knees first, and then she stands, barely able to hold her own weight, using the wall to support herself. She doesn't look at him for a long moment, too embarrassed—ashamed—and it's only when he reaches for her chin, forcing her head up, only then does she look at him, her cheeks wet and ruddy. A tear streaks down her face, catches on his thumb.

"You know it hurts me more than it hurts you when I have to do this, don't you?"

She nods pitifully, closing her eyes, crying harder.

"I'm sorry," she rasps.

He can tell by the pained, wounded look in her eyes that she wants to reach out for him, seek out the solace she knows she can find only in his arms, needy for the comfort and reassurance of a hug, but he will not give that to her, and she knows it.

He lets go of her chin, and she sniffles, lowering her eyes. He waits to go inside, watches her hobble to the car instead, like an animal with its tail tucked between its legs. She gets into the backseat, closes the door. He can see through the window that she buckles her seatbelt.

Good. Good girl.

He straightens his tie, rolls his shoulders back. Cracks his neck.

Play time.

* * *

Taylor sits in the back of the car, arms folded across her abdomen, and cries.

Deep, cavernous sobs, ones that feel like they've been dredged up from beneath layers and layers of soil, the kind of sobs that are born in the soft underbelly of rotten earth, where living things go to die.

She had only wanted to see where he was going, see what he was going to do. So much of his life he keeps shrouded in mystery from her, so many secrets, she had only wanted to know. She had only wanted to see.

He had been more energetic than usual that morning—excited in a way she rarely saw, the kind of excitement he usually reserved for special occasions—excitement she is used to having directed only at her. Maybe she was a little jealous, she thinks. She remembers biting her lip, lingering in the bathroom doorway, watching as he leaned over the bowl of the sink to bring his face as close to the mirror as possible.

He always left the bathroom door open. It didn't matter what he was doing, it was like he forgot she was there or something. He'd shower or piss with the door wide open, his back to her, but she still had to go somewhere else until he was finished.

He was wearing his purple slacks and a white wife beater. She remembers his suspenders dangling around his thighs, remembers wanting to reach out and curl one around her finger. Wind herself closer to him. He is using a straight razor to shave, and she watches as he slides it delicately over the line of his jaw, down his neck, over the slant of his throat, where he holds his Adam's apple very still.

She feels transfixed, watching him, like she is privy to some intricate ritual, something sacred not meant for her eyes. She watches the way he studies himself in the mirror, the way the razor edge skates around his scars, the look in his eyes almost something like defiance. She wonders about that, wonders about the glide of the razor, all that gnarled scar tissue, and her brows pull together.

"Do they hurt?" she blurts.

He stills. His eyes slide way down, finding hers in the mirror, his neck arched, looking at her from over the slope of his nose. He is slow to remove the razor. Set it down on the counter. He wipes off his hands with a towel, keeping his gaze on her the whole time. He doesn't say anything, just turns around to look at her in the doorway.

She swallows as he approaches, crossing the short distance between them, tall and lumbering, and somehow even just his shadow over her feels heavy. Too hot. She feels the shudder of her lungs inside her. His burning eyes. She draws her shoulders up to her ears, anxious, tense, but then he is crouching a little, bent at the waist, so that his face is level with hers, and there's nowhere to go, not with the wooden frame of the door digging into her back.

"Why don't you touch them and see?" he says.

She swallows again—afraid—not sure that she should. Some of Mr. J's invitations are not supposed to be accepted.

She bites her lip, unsure, but she hesitates too long. She has no choice when he reaches for her hands. She exhales sharply through her nose as he guides them to either side of his face, and then suddenly her open palms are pressed there, slotted against cool scar tissue, surprisingly soft, more delicate than she had imagined, more tender than the greasepaint makes them look. He uses his hands to guide hers, makes her slide her palms up and down over his scars, slowly. Reverently.

He looks at her as he does it, and it feels too intimate. Too wrong. She squirms underneath his attention, but when he finally releases her hands, she realizes that she can't stop. She lowers her hands some, letting the pads of her fingers trace over the tissue instead. Mr. J closes his eyes when she does it, and she is mesmerized. Spellbound. She never wants to stop touching him here. She skates across his ruined flesh with each of her fingers, her index finger and ring finger and then her thumb, fascinated by the feel of rippled tissue, by the way he seems to melt into her touch, eyes closed, looking like he's somewhere else entirely.

He makes a noise then, going to one knee as he does, so Taylor is looking down at him. The sound is something pulled up and out of him, something guttural, something usually tucked very far away. Goose bumps prickle over her skin, and something hot squirms in her lower belly, something alive, something she's only felt once before, when he had pried open her mouth and kissed her.

She wants him to make that noise again. And she wants to know what his scars would feel like on her tongue. What they would taste like.

Her mouth dry. She has to wet her lips, her vision hazy.

She breathes a little heavier, lost in the headiness of the moment. She pulls one of her hands away and is surprised when he chases after her touch, nuzzling his cheek into her palm like a dog who wants to keep being petted.

She swallows, and her voice comes out a little hoarse. "Does it feel good?"

He opens his eyes. Blinks up at her owlishly, where his eyes are liquid black. "Feels good."

Then his hungry eyes are on her mouth, just for a fleeting second, just brief enough for her to wonder whether or not it actually happened, and then he is rising, back to his full height again, the moment lost or forgotten, and Taylor backs away from him, retreats to her bedroom and closes the door. She stands with her back against it for a long time, has to work to catch her breath. She braces the flat of her palms against the door, can almost taste the insistent _thud thud thud_ of her heartbeat slamming against her ribcage, something that tastes like war, like a call to arms.

_Get out_, she thinks to her heart. _Get out_. She doesn't want it anymore. Not if it feels like this all the time.

Or maybe she just needs to take it out and hold it, soothe it—cradle it like a lover would.

Or maybe give it to Mr. J, let him carry it in his pocket, so they can be together all the time. He could return it to her later, at the end of the day, lay her down at nightfall and sew it back into her chest. She takes a moment to imagine it, what her skin might look like after years and years of scar tissue have formed, the skin so mutilated and deformed there is no sewing it back together. Her chest cavity hollowed out. Open and raw. Nothing can be done. Maybe then the only place to put her heart is right alongside his, where he could keep it warm next to his own. The two muscles beating feverishly together until eventually they merge into one.

Whatever has just transpired between them, whatever just took place—she wants more of it. _Needs_ more of it.

She looks down at where the hairs on her arm all stand on end, like they've been switched on by some electric current.

A little while later, she watches him lace up his shoes. He says he's going out, and when she perks up, asking, "Can I come, too?" he responds with a hard, decisive _No_ and then doesn’t elaborate further.

Her mood crumbles instantly. She sulks against the back of the couch with her arms folded across her chest. "Why not?"

"Because I_ said_ so."

She narrows her eyes and goes to her room. Locks the door. She paces at the foot of her bed for a couple of seconds. And then she slips out the window.

Hiding in the trunk had been the easy part. She hears him slide into the driver's seat a little while later. Start the car. He drives for a long time, taking enough turns so that she no longer knows where they are, where they're going. But she keeps very still; she's very good at keeping still.

When he parks the car and gets out, she waits for a few more moments before she uses the lever on the ceiling of the trunk to flip down the back row of seats. Her mistake is her eagerness—crawling out of the trunk and into the backseat too quickly. She knows she slams the door too loudly when she gets out, undone with impatience, afraid of losing sight of him.

And then he had rounded on her immediately, like he could _smell_ her. She stood, paralyzed, as he moved towards her, and she could tell from the hunch in his shoulders, the purposefulness of his gait, that she was in trouble. She was going to be punished. Then he was dragging her into a dark alley, and she was on the concrete, pinned down with his foot on her back, and she felt so _stupid_, thinking she could follow him without being seen. What was she thinking?

Now, in the backseat, she gently trails her fingers along the column of her throat where the skin burns, still hot to the touch from the heat and intensity of his fingertips. When she swallows, she feels it.

She lays her head back against the seat and waits. She's good at that, too.

* * *

The Joker steps inside the elevator. Watches the doors slide closed. He lifts his chin to tighten his tie, catches sight of his warped reflection in the silver doors. He's more impatient than usual for this particular little get-together. Oswald had promised this was going to be _well_ worth his while.

And the fat sonofbitch had better plan on making good on his promise, otherwise the Joker is going to bludgeon him to death with his own umbrella and then feed the blubbery remains to his fucking _penguins_.

What is it with supervillains and their weird fetishes? It isn't like the Joker's got a hard-on for clowns, after all. They're just _funny_. He's not illegally importing a colony of them from the Arctic or anything.

He straightens his jacket when the elevator bell chimes. The doors open up into a large, spacious penthouse. Floor to ceiling windows. Sleek, black marble floors. Faux-gold lighting fixtures and curvaceous lounge furniture, the hard, slippery kind that make it impossible to sit up straight. It's luxurious. Sterile in a way that conveys to the Joker that this is only penthouse one of five. He also knows there are no other tenants in the building. He knows, too, that Oswald's listed the building as a 1031 exchange on his tax receipts, even though the structure is clearly not a rental or investment property. But that's neither here nor there. He just likes to know what he's walking into before he walks in. Just like he knows Oswald's got men patrolling every floor. Just like he knows _his_ guy's got a clean shot through the upper east window if this all turns to shit.

Just a little insurance policy, that's all.

He hopes it won't have to come to that. It'd be a shame with all this white furniture and all.

He picks up a weird, marble paperweight from some ugly end table with skinny legs as he strolls in. It's heavy. Sharp-cornered. He's never had a taste for such arrogant opulence. What the fuck do you do with something like this? He tosses it back and forth between his hands like it's a baseball.

"Ah, you made it," Oswald says as he approaches, crossing the long expanse of tiled floor. "In your usual dilatory fashion, I see. Punctuality clearly does not bear the importance for you as it does the rest of us."

"Punc-tu-_ality_," the Joker enunciates. "_Huh_." He looks at the paperweight in his hands, and then hurls it into the massive, moon-faced clock directly above Oswald's head. "There." He says, after the glass has finished showering onto the floor. "Now everybody's on time."

"Jesus," Oswald says, looking unruffled for not the first time. He recovers from his shriveled posture, but thankfully none of the glass landed on him. "That clock costs more than it would take to repair your _face_."

The Jokerbarks with laughter. "I _like_ that," he says, grinning. He comes closer to Oswald's desk. Mahogany. Shiny. "I'm sure it's nothing you can't afford," he says, moving closer still. Close enough to rest the flat of his palms along the edges of the desk, leaning down. Low. "And I'm _sure _you didn't mean to offend me by telling me I'm late. Whole gang's here, looks like. Why aren't you _talking_?" Oswald opens his mouth to retort, but the Joker cuts him off before he can. "And what the fuck is _he_ doing here?"

They both turn to look at the man that the Joker had glanced at only in his peripheral upon first entering.

What an _ugly _sonofabitch.

Jervis Tetch is one-hundred and fifty pounds and stands at 5'3'' on a _good_ day. It's embarrassing. Doesn't help that he insists on wearing fucking breeches like this is the goddamn _1700s_, or the putrid green tailcoat with the high collar. And don't get him started on the top hat.

"Now, now," Oswald says, leaning back in his chair. Grimacing. He steeples his fingers together like he's the evil villain from some terrible Bond movie. "Play nice," he intones.

Cobblepot is clearly enjoying this, having the two of them here like this. He knows they can't stand each other, and why should the Joker give this campy, Alice-in-Wonderland-obsessed freak the time of day?

It's his methods he doesn't agree with. Mind control? Who needs to create a gadget for that when you can do it psychologically—the _fun_ way. Not to mention he's spoiled so many of the Joker's playdates with Batman the Joker just wants to take him out right here. His fingers itch with needy desire. He'd love to go for the jugular, wants to see him bleed out all over that idiotic, paisley vest. For some reason he imagines Jervis's blood would be black. Slimy. Like an oil spill.

He would've done it already if he could, but the bitch is more slippery than a goddamn eel, and the Joker doesn't have the patience to chase him around the block, not when he knows Jervis would enjoy it so much, like it's a game of _tag_.

The top hat compensates for the set of balls this manchild playing dress-up clearly lacks.

The Joker supposes it also compensates for his receding hairline. Killing two birds with one stone, that one.

"Hello, Joker."

He even hates the sound of his voice. Tinny and excited. A little croaky. Like he never really finished hitting puberty all the way through but then somehow managed to get stuck there.

There's something gelatinous about him, like if you were to get close enough to poke him with a stick, he'd liquefy into a carcass of wet, shivering meat. Maybe it has to do with the weird pallor to his skin, sallow and pancreatic. Or how his face is crisscrossed with deep-set wrinkles, yet is strangely smooth, too. And his eyes, set too deeply into his skull, punctuated by the bulbous bags he carries beneath them, forever evaded by sleep.

"Last time I saw you…" he's sitting on the very edge of the couch, hands on his knees, excited. His eyes are lit up. Yellow. Almost reptilian. "You were down on your knees. In front of me. Do you remember?"

Batman tells him that Jervis had used one of his mind control devices on him, that Jervis had ordered the Joker to kill Batman. Batman tells the Joker he had almost succeeded.

The Joker has no recollection of this. He only remembers afterwards, when he had come for Jervis with a tire iron. Jervis would be dead now, if it weren't for Batman.

He pretends to think. "Hm," he says, "Doesn't ring any bells. Maybe _you_ remember lying belly up on the pavement, taking the beating of your life?"

"I remember," he says, giddy—smug, for some reason.

The Joker's mouth thins into a straight line, and he exhales through his nose. It's like talking to a _child_.

He returns his gaze back to Oswald. If he looks at this nursery rhyme freak for one second longer he's going to snap like a bungee cord.

"The reason you both are here," Oswald says, redirecting the conversation, "is because we aim to accomplish the same goal."

The Joker stares. "And what goal is that?"

"We all know Batman's new little toy has been a bit of a… problem."

"Robin? The 'Boy Wonder'?" the Joker asks incredulously.

"_Nightwing_," Jervis interjects.

The Joker slowly cranes his neck to look at him. Annoyed. "Different name. Same _kid_."

'Boy Wonder' was the name christened to him by all the least reputable tabloids. ‘Robin’ is what he had wanted to be called—or perhaps that was just the name Batman had chosen for him—but he supposed that all changed when the kid got his ass handed to him by Two-Face. Time to man up after that. Recreate his identity. Solicit himself as something better. Stronger. Something that could be taken seriously. He reemerged with a new name _and_ a new suit.

He turns back to Oswald, works his mouth. "I don't see the problem."

Oswald smirks a little. "You wouldn't, would you? Since you're so busy chasing after Batman."

"Then enlighten me," he growls. "Nightwing is a distraction. He's the _hors d'oeuvre_ before the main course. He doesn't _matter_."

"Nightwing is more of a threat than you think. He has infiltrated several of our operations along various fronts. He's crippled us from even attempting to make another move. He's been… very, very bad for business."

The Joker’s eyes glimmer dangerously. "Then do, pray tell, edify me on what your big bad plan is. And you better explain it to me in under ten seconds because I'm already _bored_." He shifts closer, cocking his head at an angle that should be unnatural. "You won't like me when I'm bored."

"That’s where I come in," Jervis says, still perched on the edge of the couch, sitting up a little straighter, as if he's been waiting for this exact moment to hatch his evil master plan. Both men turn to look at him. "Mind control," he says, grinning. "If we can't kill him, we control him. I get the little bird off my back, and _you_ get to hit Batman where it hurts."

The Joker rolls his eyes skyward, squinting. The cogs are turning now. "You want me to kill him."

Jervis narrows his eyes. "We want you to immobilize him.”

He sees it now, his purpose in all of this. But not all of his questions have been answered.

"What's in it for you?" He looks at Oswald. He feels like he already knows.

He sees Jervis out of the corner of his eyes, folding in on himself a little, looking sheepish all the sudden.

Oswald clears his throat to redirect the Joker's attention. "Just consider me a liaison between two warring parties," he says, smiling thinly. The Joker glares at him, smells the lie right through his sharp, thin little teeth. There’s sweat beading along his bald forehead. Oswald caves slightly, attempting to amend his earlier statement. "Let's just say Mr. Tetch and I share a common interest."

"And what interest is that?"

Oswald and Jervis share a look. "Mr. Tetch here supplies me with… clients."

"_Oh_," the Joker brightens, understanding now. "Aaaall the little girls and boys. That is _naughty_," he says.

"I've been testing my technology at Gotham Heights. It's nearly ready," Jervis says.

The Joker spins on him all the sudden. Very interested now. His jacket flaring around him, a flash of salmon pink silk. "How do you do it?"

Jervis stutters only for a moment at the sudden intensity, taken aback. "Do what?"

"Mind control." The Joker holds up his hands and fans out his fingers, as if to say,_ magic_.

"Headbands. They emit the necessary gamma rays for as long as the victim is wearing it. And she _won't_ want to take it off."

"Well," he says, knowingly, "that does narrow down the clientele a little bit, doesn't it?"

"Just giving the people what they want," Oswald interjects, leaning back with a pinched, sour little grin.

It's filthy, what they're doing. He's not particularly into the seedier components of these underground schemes—and it doesn't thrill him to be working along Tetch.

But the opportunity to take down Robin—_Nightwing_—play with Batman's little blue bird for a few hours, ruffle his feathers, or pluck them entirely, send him back home to Batman as a mere shell of the person he was before. It's too delicious to pass up.

He'll strip off his wings. Hollow him out.

Batman will come for him, then. He won't be able to stand it.

"I'm so glad we had this talk," he says. He steps away from Oswald's desk, has his back turned towards them as he stands in front of the window, his plan beautiful, even now, already beginning to take shape.

"It's important that you don't kill him," Jervis warns. "He's vital to the operation. He'll keep us on the inside, once I have him controlled. All you have to do is capture him."

The Joker doesn't say anything.

"You know," Jervis continues on, and the Joker can tell he's about to say something smug. Something he is going to regret. "You may have seen some of my technologies already in use... I've been told you're in the vicinity of Gotham Heights quite a bit these days."

The Joker's shoulders tense, spine going rigid, but it's imperceptible to the naked eye. He turns slowly on his heel to face the room. He looks at Oswald first, who is trying to convey something to Jervis with subtle dilations of his pupils, perhaps a warning. Perhaps _don't_. And then the Joker turns his attention to Jervis, who is watching him closely, a deviant little smirk playing at the one corner of his mouth. The Joker wants to split his shit-eating grin all the way up to his ears.

"Don't know about that," he says, casual. He works his mouth a bit as he takes his time crossing the room, ambling behind the couch where Jervis sits, straight-backed and proper. When he's directly behind him, he rests his forearms against the back of the couch, leans down low to speak into Jervis's ear. Jervis turns his head just slight, just enough to have the Joker in his peripheral. "But y'know… think I _do_ remember being on my knees… though, as I recall, it was still _you _who were looking up at_ me_."

Jervis does the smartest thing he's done since the Joker got there, which is to keep his mouth shut. He holds the moment just a little longer, just enough to make Jervis really uncomfortable, and then he straightens to his full height.

Oswald studies him closely.

"Gent-tel-men," the Joker says, "I don't know about you—but I'm suddenly in the mood for _scrambled eggs_."

* * *

Taylor jolts awake sometime later, gasping. When she lifts her head from the seat, she whines at the sharp pain, the crick in her neck. The seatbelt has been digging a hard line into her cheek, and she reaches up to touch the indentation it left behind with the pads of her fingers.

Dusk, now, the sky gray blue, dusted with a thin blanket of wispy clouds. It's April, so it still gets a little cold at night, now that the sun is gone; only a cool, yellow sliver of it remains, stretched out along the edge of the horizon. She rubs her eyes with her fists and yawns, feeling the tight stretch of her throat, the skin tender and even more inflamed than before. She sits up in her seat a little, and that's when she feels it, something sticky and wet between her thighs.

She frowns, confused, and when she looks down, she is horrified to find that the seat beneath her is soaked with blood. Her jeans are saturated with it, and she gasps, trying to lift up some, but the seatbelt holds her back. For a second, she moves to unbuckle it, but then she remembers what Mr. J had said. She twists around in her seat instead, looking for him, wondering how many hours have passed.

She whines and reaches out for the door for support when a painful cramp tears through her lower belly. She bites down on her lip and nearly folds in half at the sensation.

Hadn't she overhead Shelby Harris talking about something like this in PE once, in the locker room after dodgeball? The cramping, the bleeding from her vagina, how that meant she was a "woman" now? Or all of Meredith's pads and tampons she kept hidden beneath the bathroom sink? That's what those were for, right?

She doesn't know what to do. They haven't covered this chapter in her health class yet. No one's ever explained this to her before. How long is it supposed to last? When does the blood stop? Does it always hurt this bad? Should she go to the hospital?

Waiting for Mr. J to return is agony. The cramps are getting worse. She thinks maybe lying on her belly might help, but she doesn't dare unbuckle her seatbelt to test that theory.

She tries not to panic, but the blood is so sticky and warm, and it just keeps coming. She knows she's ruined his seats. Her jeans. She's terrified of how Mr. J will respond.

It's dark now. She really has to pee, the pressure in her bladder starting to make her squirm. Did Mr. J forget about her? What could he possibly be doing that is taking so long? What if—

The driver's side door rips open suddenly. She swallows as the light comes on, too bright, and then not Mr. J—_the Joker_—coming into view, the shock of his painted face as he dips his head low to look at her in the backseat, his hands braced against the top of the car as he stares at her.

She squirms, her thighs rubbing together where they're tacky with hours-worth of dried blood. She awkwardly folds her hands over her lap, but there is no hiding the shame of crimson that has bloomed around her.

"Mr. J," she whimpers, starting on an apology that never actually comes.

"My, my," he says. Her face heats up when his gaze slides to her crotch and stays there. "What a mess you've made."

He finally looks at her, and she bites her lip and sniffles, trying not to cry.

"I'm sorry," she blurts. "I didn't—I don't—" She watches him slide into the driver's seat. Close the door. He's still looking at her. "I want to go home," she whines. She's never been so embarrassed in her whole life. She folds her arms across her stomach and hugs herself. "I didn't mean to," she finishes.

He starts the car. Turns around to look down into her lap again. She watches the way he tongues at his lower lip for a moment, like he's deep in thought—and then his eyes are back over the dashboard.

"I know you didn't, sweetheart."

There's no tenderness to it, just a frenzied, distracted lilt to his voice, like he's on the edge of some other thought entirely. She doesn't know whether or not she should be relieved.

The drive home is quiet. She wonders what he's thinking about. If he's forgotten about her disobeying him. Her punishment.

They pull in. He turns off the car, and the overhead light falls away after a moment, and they're submerged in darkness. Taylor stills. She doesn't know if it's okay to unbuckle her seatbelt or not. She waits for some sort of sign. An indication. Then he's opening the door and getting out, and before she knows it, he's yanking open hers, holding it open with a flourish, as if to say, _after you_. It's so dark, she can barely see him. He waits for her to step out and then closes the door behind her.

Her legs cramp painfully after having sat in the same position for so many hours. Her thighs and lower back ache. The pain in her lower belly stubbornly persists.

She's glad it's so dark. Hopefully he can't see the evidence of her shame. She waits for him to unlock the door, and as soon as it's open, she's running to the bathroom before the lights are even on. Slams the door behind her. Locks it. Kicks off her shoes, peels down her jeans. Her underwear is completely soaked. She stuffs it in the trash beneath the sink along with her jeans. They're of no use to her now.

She climbs into the shower before it's even hot and furiously scrubs all the blood from in between her thighs, even as clumpy, maroon globs of it slip out of her as the water rains down from overhead. She watches it slide down the yellowed floor of the tub and into the drain.

She gets out. Wraps herself in a towel, tucking it beneath her armpits. Steam pours out of the bathroom when she opens the door, but everything is dark. The door to Mr. J's bedroom is closed. There is no light peeking out from beneath the door.

She puts on a fresh pair of underwear, stuffs a carefully folded wad of toilet paper in the seat of her underwear. Hopefully that'll be enough.

In her room, she sees a glass of water. Can't remember if it was from the night before or not. It tastes stale, but she drinks it down. Turns off the light and lies down. Tries to sleep, but it won't come. Her cramps feel worse now that it's dark and there's nothing to distract her from them. She stares into the empty blackness of her room as another wave of pain pulses through her belly. She curls in on herself and tries not to cry.

It's too much. She slips out of bed and pads to Mr. J's room. She pushes open his door and it slowly creaks open, a familiar cry. A streetlamp shines through one of the windows in the living room, and it paints a white path for her along the carpet as she goes to him, slipping into the empty space beside him, on top of the covers.

She doesn't usually wake him. She wouldn't dare exercise the risk of spoiling the moment—the special privilege of being this close to him, existing in this shared space, breaking the spell that this moment always casts, the illusion of intimacy.

But this time she does wake him, touching his back, and then grabbing his shoulder and shaking him a little when he doesn't respond. He stirs then, and she wets her lips, suddenly finding it hard to speak.

"Mr. J, it _hurts_," she whines. She keeps her voice low, just a whisper. "Is it supposed to hurt this much?"

He surprises her by rolling towards her, pushing her onto her other side so that she is facing away from him. For a moment, she is terrified, thinking he's going to put a pillow over her face and suffocate her, or squeeze her until her ribs crack one by one, punching sharp holes into her soft lungs. But then he is pulling her back against him, his arm reaching over her waist, and she feels him press a big, warm hand over her belly, splaying it out, and the pressure is nice. Comforting. It ebbs the pain.

"Go to sleep," he murmurs. He nuzzles into her neck with his nose, releasing a heavy exhale, all wet, warm breath, and Taylor hardly dares to breathe. This can't be real, can it?

The pressure of his hand splayed against her abdomen doesn't let up, and it takes a long time, but eventually she does relax against him, going boneless, allowing all the tension of the day that had coiled up so tight inside her to finally unwind. Her head feels so heavy on the pillow, and her eyelids begin to flutter. Mr. J is warm and solid behind her, where she feels every part of him; she almost thinks she can feel his heartbeat against her back, but maybe she imagines it.

She wakes to an empty bed—as she usually does. She sits up and yawns, open-mouthed, stretching her arms over head. From the double window above the bed, sunlight streams in through the open slats in the blinds, pale and warm, and the rays catch on all the lingering dust particles floating in the air. She hasn't slept that well in a long time, she thinks. Maybe it was the stress of the day, or her period—but she thinks it's Mr. J and the warm hand he had pressed against her belly, the way he had curled himself around her, fit their bodies together—something that, before, she had only ever dreamed about.

At some point during the night, she must have crawled under the covers. She pushes them off her now, and is horrified to discover the dried pool of red soaked into the white sheets. Her pajama shorts are ruined, too. She swallows—embarrassed, afraid—wondering if Mr. J had noticed, if he'll be mad to know that she's ruined not only the backseat of his car, but now his mattress.

She starts to swing her legs over the side of the bed, scooting towards the edge of the mattress, but is suddenly drawn to a pause.

There are bloody fingerprints dotted all along Mr. J's side of the bed.

She frowns, confused. She looks down at her own hands, flipping them over in her lap, where her fingertips are pale and clean.

Had he accidentally pressed his hands into the bloody pool that had bloomed around her? Maybe when he was getting up? That had to be it… right?

She swallows, looking up, craning her neck a little, trying to see through the open crack in the doorway, knowing he'll be out there. Waiting for her.

She looks down at the fingerprints again, touches them—slowly—trails over the bloodied marks with the tips her own fingers.

She doesn't wonder about the other possibility.

He didn't.

He _wouldn't_.

The blood reminds her of Nathan. The killing. It reminds her of being raped in the back of his car. All that blood, sliding down her thighs, sticky and then caked there at the end of it. How she had to scrub and scrub to get it all off her. And then after, the dawning realization that Mr. J had known. That he had planned it. That he had _wanted _it. It still sickens her. She'd be lying if she said it didn't. But she trusts him. She trusts him.

Doesn't she?

The rapid rise and fall of her chest hurts, suddenly.

She gets up. Strips off the sheets with a bit more force than necessary, like it's a race, like she has to destroy the evidence of what might have been. When she turns around, blankets and sheets bunched in her arms, he is there, in the doorway, leaning against the frame with his legs crossed at the ankles. Arms folded against his chest. Watching her.

"Morning," he drawls, nice and slow. Taylor avoids his dark, penetrating gaze.

She mumbles a hurried 'good morning' back to him, and then hopes he doesn't see that her hands are shaking as she squeezes past him in the doorway.

She knows he cranes his head to look at her from over his shoulder. She can feel the scalding heat of his eyes on her back. But she doesn't catch his dangerous smirk.

* * *

"You know, for a clown, you aren't very funny."

It's a couple of weeks later. The night is warm. They're on a rooftop somewhere, stars blotted out by smog and thick clouds, and Nightwing is perched high up, some ten or fifteen feet above him on an elevated fire escape. The Joker is about to detonate a bomb—or is at least pretending to.

He grins.

"Shouldn't you be, uh, heading on home now, little bird? Isn't it past your bedtime?"

"I know you're working with Mad Hatter," he says.

Ah. Straight to the point then. Just like Batman. He can play that game, too.

"Do you?" the Joker challenges, dangerously. "And does daddy know you're out here so late, all by yourself?"

He can tell from the boy's delayed response that Batman doesn't know, and that Nightwing snuck out here all by his lonesome. His plot to draw him out had worked. Everything is all going according to plan—and Cobblepot will keep the big bad Bat away as previously discussed.

"He won't come, you know," Nightwing says. "He knows I can handle myself."

No. He won't come—but not for that reason.

"Can you?"

Nightwing narrows his eyes. "He hates you. He said you you're delusional, that you think he needs you. He doesn't."

The jealousy radiating off him is _delicious, _he can almost taste it. This is even better than he had planned. He tongues at his lower lip, leans in a bit, looking up at him, eyes glimmering even in the darkness.

"I bet he makes _you _feel needed though, doesn't he? Lined you up, picked you out of the pack himself. Made you feel special. Batman's _good_ at making you feel special. Wanted. But you're nobody to him. When you die—and you will die—he'll move on to finding the next Boy Wonder! It'll be like you were never even here. You're _replaceable_." He stands back a bit. "How does that make you feel?"

Nightwing flips down from the fire escape, landing on the concrete with a smooth somersault. The Joker smiles at this display of athleticism. Even Batman isn't this graceful and smooth. This is someone with extensive training—perhaps from birth. Nightwing rests on his haunches several feet away. Always ready to move quickly. The boy's smart enough to know he should keep his distance, the Joker will give him that.

"Do you always run your mouth like that when you talk to strangers?"

The Joker smiles. Advancing on him. "Now, I'd hardly call us _strangers_, little bird. Mommy and daddy have been playing together for a long, long time."

"Ugh. Does that make you my mother?"

The Joker stops. "If I were your mother I'd be sending a brat like you off to boarding school before you could even blink."

Nightwing chuckles. "Okay, so you're a _little _funny," he amends.

"I'm can be downright _hilarious _once you get to know me. Why don't you come a little closer? I'll show you."

"I'm good from here, thanks," Nightwing says. He shifts a little, watching the Joker carefully. There's still plenty of distance between them. The Joker just needs him a little bit closer. "You're wrong about him, you know. He's not—using me."

The Joker cocks his head. "Maybe. But you're only as useful as he _allows_ you to be. He keeps you on a tight leash, doesn't he? Must be hard for you. You're a big strong boy, but he has a hard time letting you out of the cage at night, huh?" He tsks. "He must not trust you enough."

"Batman does trust me."

The Joker shrugs. He starts a slow circle around him. "You lied about being here tonight, didn't you? You're certainly not gaining any points with him that way…."

Nightwing shifts so his back isn’t to him. "What are you trying to say?"

"Maybe Batman does trust you—but just not enough. Maybe he's still testing the waters. But you'll do something to break his trust before he can award it to you fully. You'll _crush_ him. _Aaaaand_…."

Nightwing shakes his head as if to say, _"Yeah, and?"_

"You'll be _nobody_ after that. Stripped of your purpose, your _wings_. Batman _always_ throws out his old toys," he grins. "Y'know…" he circles a little closer, "when I killed your brother—_Jason_—Batman wouldn't even avenge him. He did nothing. _Nothing_ to me."

Nightwing stands, drawn to his full height at the Joker's provocation. He looks unsettled, unsure for the first time.

_There we go._

"What are you talking about? I don't have a brother."

"Oh, you don't know about that timeline yet, do you? That's okay," he smirks. Eyes dark. "You will."

Nightwing stares at him like he's grown a second head. He swallows, some of his earlier bravado gone now. "You're even crazier than I thought. Just like he said."

There's a moving billboard behind him, and it bathes them both in red for a moment. "Batman knows I'm not crazy. That's why he can't put me down!" He’s closer now. He stops in front of him. "Can you put me down?" he probes, cocking his head. "Will you? You'll wonder about it if you don't, when I kill Jason. You'll punish yourself, _if I only I had killed the Joker when I had the chance_. It'll plague you for the rest of your life.” The billboard flashes dark blue behind him. The wind picks up, too, tousling Nightwing’s jet black hair. “You'd be doing Batman a favor. You could do what Batman can't."

"Won't," Nightwing corrects. "What Batman_ won't_." The Joker shrugs in lieu of a reply. "I'm not going to kill you," Nightwing says. But he’s reaching for escrima sticks. Conversation over with. He finally steps closer, full of intent, purpose behind his eyes, in his gate, and the Joker grins.

Finally.

"No—but I'm going to kill _you_."

* * *

_One week later…_

Taylor gets out of school at half past two.

It's a half day for them, and she's glad to be out early. It's a bright, clear day. The sky is eggshell blue, unmarred by clouds. It's a little cool, but the sun is warm. Some of the trees are starting to bud, too. The dogwoods along the edges of the baseball field are already in full bloom. The white flowers are pretty, but they stink, and the smell is easily carried by the wind, eye-watering and potent, like fresh dog crap. She always tries to hold her breath when she catches a whiff of them.

Before long, it'll be summer. She wonders what she and Mr. J will do together during summer break. Maybe they can go somewhere fun, like a waterpark or something. There's one in Sparta she's heard everyone talking about, Splash Zone or something. She wonders if he'd take her there. Or maybe the zoo. She's never been to the zoo before.

There are massive stone steps leading up to the front of the school, and she skips down them, feeling happy. It's the weekend. She can sleep in tomorrow. And she's going to cook dinner for Mr. J tonight. She can't wait to go home and get started. She bought pancake mix—the name brand kind that comes in the big yellow box—and milk and eggs and butter. She's been saving up her allowance for a long time, carefully counting all the bills that Mr. J gives her, keeping them tucked safely beneath the mattress—not that she thinks he'd take them from her, but old habits and all that.

She yawns at the bottom of the stairs, where the staircase fans out and becomes wider at the bottom. Maybe a nap first, though. The spring time weather makes her tired, and all the pollen makes her throat and eyes itch. She might have the beginnings of a cold. She sets her backpack on the ground and sits on the steps while she waits for the bus, rubs her eyes with both fists. When the black fuzzy dots have evaporated, she opens her eyes and is surprised to find a butterfly there, a beautiful one, a black swallowtail with dustings of yellow along the bottom line of its wings.

"Hey, little fella," she whispers. She holds out her index finger for him, offering a place of rest, and it does a curious thing then—it lands there.

Taylor's eyes widen in surprise.

She notices, then, that there is another one floating close by, above her head. And another one. And another one by the small trees lining the edge of the sidewalk. She looks around to see if anyone notices, but no one does.

The butterfly on her finger flutters away. Taylor slings her backpack over her shoulder and gets up to follow them, more and more butterflies coming into view. She wonders where they've all come from.

She follows them into the expanse of grass nearby, through the stoic, wrought-iron gates of Wayne Park, a massive grounds allocated to "rehabilitating the underprivileged youths". The idea for the park was that it would provide an alternative activity to crime, that it would cut down on gang membership and other sordid proclivities. There was a skate ramp and a playground and a pond with ducks, lots of little bridges and scenic walking paths.

Now kids mostly just meet there after school to sell drugs. Sometimes they fuck over in the East Side, beneath the dark, moist underbelly of the cobblestone bridge. And last summer they pulled up a body from the shaded depths of the pond, bloated and striped with algae. She was young. Pretty. She had been missing for half a year. They'd found her with barbed wire around her throat. Eyes gouged out.

Taylor follows the butterflies deeper into the park, winding along the natural curve of the path, where they guide her to a weeping willow, already well into bloom, a gorgeous cascade of green, like a soft waterfall. She dips her head underneath the leaves, steps into the shadows of the massive tree, and she sees there's a square, metal cage with netting along the inside, housing even more butterflies. Further still, a man sitting on a bench, tending to the butterflies who dance around him, and it's as if he controls them, some kind of master marionettist, only the strings are invisible. Taylor is entranced.

He looks up as if he had been expecting her. Smiles.

"Hello there."

Taylor balks a little. Shy. She's unsure if she should say something back, but she supposes it would be rude not to.

"Hello," she says, tentative.

"You can come closer," the man says. He's still smiling. "I won't bite."

Only people who bite ever say that, but she comes closer anyway.

She snags her bottom lip into her mouth with her teeth. She crosses her arms at first and then thinks that might make her look too scared, so she holds her hands in front of her instead, over her belly.

"Are those your butterflies?" she asks.

"Yes," the man says. He sounds excited. "Come see."

She does. She can't help it. It's as if she's being pulled to them on a string. She steps further inside the cocoon of the tree, where the butterflies dance and flutter all around her, playing in the drooping tree branches, so bright, even in the cool shadow the oversized tree casts. She cranes her neck to look up into the maze of gnarled branches above her, so thick she can barely see the sky. A finger of sunlight finds its way through, and the butterflies must like to feel its warmth on the backs of their wings because they keep floating around that solitary strip of it. Wings so thin and delicate they are nearly transparent. Taylor smiles.

When she lowers her gaze, the man is still looking at her. His smile has receded into a placid grin. Something coils in her lower belly, a slimy tendril of fear.

She sees him up close the first time now, and she is startled by his yellow eyes, the weird, bilious pallor of his skin. She frowns at his formal attire, his vest and plaid brown pants. His oversized trench shields the more particular details of his attire, the coat the color of old pond water—green, but almost brown—with lots of buckles and straps. His vest underneath is muddy green, and underneath that she thinks his shirt is dotted faintly with little flowers. It reminds her of the patterns seen on tea cups.

"What's your name?" he asks. He is sitting straight-backed on the edge of the bench. He has very good posture.

"Taylor."

"My, that is a pretty name. A pretty name for a pretty girl."

She shouldn't, but she flushes from the praise, her cheeks hot. She bites her lip and looks away. She should probably go.

"You know," the man says. "You look just like _Alice_, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Have you read it?"

She has read it. It was on her required reading list when she was in middle school. She didn't really like it though. It kind of scared her.

She nods, slowly. The man scoots slightly closer. He has short, stubby little hands tucked inside fingerless gloves, and there are several deep lines etched around his mouth when he smiles. His eyebrows are bushy and unkempt. Curly tufts of sand-colored hair poke out from beneath the rim of his hat.

"You know, if you had a blue dress, and a black headband, you'd look exactly like her."

"I would?"

"Well, you don't have Alice's blue eyes. But that can easily be fixed. You are _delightful_, after all."

"Oh… okay." She swallows. She doesn't like the way he is looking at her. "Well," she says, unsure why her hands feel so clammy all the sudden, "I should probably go home."

The man cocks his head at her. Frowns. "So soon?"

"My—my uncle will be angry with me if I'm not home in time—in time for dinner." She hates the way her tongue fumbles all over the words, like it can't find its footing. She averts her gaze, looking outside the dome of hanging branches—which suddenly feel suffocating—and searches for a familiar face, someone who she might call out to, someone who could rescue her.

There is no one.

"Oh, that is a _shame_. It's such a lovely day… I was going to invite you to my tea party."

A butterfly lands on Taylor's shoulder. She turns her neck to look at it, but it flutters away a second later.

"Your tea party?"

"Yes, I have one every spring, on a day just like this.” She watches as he pulls a large pocket watch on a gold chain from the inside of his trousers. It’s much larger than Mr. J’s. It’s gaudy. He doesn’t look at it though, just dangles it in front of his face. Back and forth, back and forth it swings on the chain, like a pendulum. “Oh, and lots of people come,” he goes on. “Why, you've never been to a party like it!" The man stands, and Taylor's eyebrows raise in surprise. They're almost the same height. "There are cookies and cakes and candies, all the sweets you could possibly desire."

Taylor shakes her head. She starts to back away. "I really should go."

He is advancing on her, slowly, like he has all the time in the world. Taylor feels the tickle of the willow leaves along the back of her thighs, brushing up against her backpack.

"Why don't you come? It's not far."

Looking at the pocket watch makes her feel funny, so she tries not to. But then suddenly she can’t look away.

She shakes her head again, her forehead creased in panic. "Please, I—I can't," she whispers. She doesn't understand why she can't move all the sudden.

"Surely you can," the man says. He's reaching a hand into his trench coat as he comes closer, the pocket watch gone, and Taylor's heart thuds inside her ears. He pulls out something thin and black. U-shaped. "I just... want to see," he says. He stands in front of her now, and Taylor can't move. She tastes the sharp bite of sulfur on her tongue, the stench of frayed electrical wires emanating from his trench coat. She watches him with wide eyes, helpless, as he reaches up and places the headband on her. "There," he says, pleased. And then, in a lower voice, "My, you _do_ look like Alice."

Something happens to her when he puts the headband on her. Her eyes flutter rapidly for a moment, and the world tilts, as if someone has taken it off its axis and rolled it onto its side. She feels heavy and light all at once. A giggle bubbles up insider her throat. Is this what it feels like to be drunk?

"I—I want to come to your tea party," she hears herself saying. She doesn't know where the thought comes from, or why she sounds so far away, like she’s underwater. But she wants to go to the tea party. She wants it. She wants it.

"Well, of course you do!" the man says jovially. "And we better hurry. We don't want to be late!"

He goes. The butterflies forgotten.

She follows.

\--

He tells her she's not dressed for a tea party. Of course she's not. She can't go to a tea party in jeans and a t-shirt. That'd be preposterous.

He urges her to lie down on the hard floor. It's dark and cold. A little musty. They are in a basement of some kind. She doesn't mind though. Mr. Hatter is cutting open her shirt. He tugs her jeans off. That's okay. She won't need those. She looks up at him as his calloused palms slide over her kneecaps.

"Doesn't that feel nice?" he asks.

Her lips part. "Yes."

He slides white stockings up each leg, and yes, that feels better. Black shoes next—Mary Janes—which he takes great care in buckling.

He slips something over her head. Helps her pull her arms through the sleeves. It's a blue dress with puff sleeves and a white apron. She giggles. Happy. He helps her onto her knees and then stands behind her, bending a little to button up the back for her. His sour breath curls over her spine. She doesn't mind. She doesn't mind.

"_Now_ you're dressed for our tea party, Alice."

He grins, and she smiles back. She lets him lead her to a long, rectangular table covered in white linen. There are chairs neatly pushed in on both sides of the table. Every place setting is perfectly arranged. Tea cups and saucers and folded napkins at every setting. Steam wafts from the mouth of a floral tea pot. She sits at the head of the table, in a large cushioned chair that is different from all the rest. Mr. Hatter sits next to her on her left side, too close, but she doesn't mind. She doesn't mind.

"Would you like some tea, my dear Alice?"

"Yes. Yes, please."

He pours some in her tea cup. It doesn't smell like any tea she's ever had before. She hazards a small sip just to check the temperature. Burns her tongue. She winces, and the cup slips out of her hand in her shock. It shatters to the hard floor.

She jumps at the sound. For a second, she doesn't know where she is, or how she got there, but then Mr. Hatter is up and out of his chair, fretting over her spilled tea. She's gotten some on her dress.

"Sh, sh, that's quite alright," he says. He pats down her dress. Uses a napkin from the table to dab at the wet spot. Tenderly smooths out the wrinkles. His hands feel heavy on her thighs.

"I'm… I'm so clumsy," she says in lieu of an apology.

"Our dear Alice just needs a little help is all, isn't that right?"

"Yes."

She looks up to find Mr. Hatter's eyes on hers. He pours her another cup of tea and blows on it first to cool it. He brings the cup to her lips and helps her take a sip. And then another. And another. She feels the fingers of his free hand trailing along her throat as she swallows, as if he wants to follow the liquid all the way down her throat, into her belly.

"Let's _feast_ now, shall we?"

They're outside now, in a grassy spot in the woods, surrounded by trees and wildflowers, a shower of green vines. The grass has grown up around the legs of the table, as if helping to root it in its place. The sky is the same blue as her dress. She looks up at the spotlight fixed on her—no, the sun—and basks in its warmth. She's still in her plush chair at the head of the table, which stretches on for as long as she can see. There is no end to it. The air smells sweet and thick. She closes her eyes and breathes it in.

When her eyes blink open, she gasps. There are sweets of every kind. Iced buttercream cookies, red velvet cupcakes shaped like mushrooms, little flags staked in the icing, crying, EAT ME!, EAT ME!, a colorful array of jelly beans spilled inside miniature teacups, and shortbread cookies shaped like playing cards, an eight of hearts, a queen of diamonds. So many jellies to choose from—orange, grape, and raspberry delight—she uses the corner of her cookie to scoop up some orange jam and takes a bite. The flavors burst over her tongue like an explosion of fireworks. Bowls of cherry-colored Jell-O, each topped with pretty whorls of whipped cream and a cherry with the stem sticking up. She plucks off a cherry and the gelatin wobbles, which makes her giggle. Strawberries coated in dark chocolate, dipped in sprinkles, arranged on sticks in a little vase like a bouquet of flowers. Frazzleberry lemonade that is fizzy and blue, like the color of the ocean at a tropical resort. Ropes of licorice that are pink and yellow and green. Chocolate coins coated in sprinkles. Hot fudge striped over caramel brownies. She's never seen so much decadence.

A cake with a clock's face that spills yellow cream when Mr. Hatter slices it open. She wants it.

"That one!" she points.

"Now, now, don't be _greedy_, Alice."

He scoops a slice onto a plate for her. When she goes to reach for it, he bats her hand away.

"I'll take care of that now," he says. He breaks off a chunk of the cake and feeds it to her, and then goes back to swipe two fingers through the yellow cream, offers them to her. She leans forward and eagerly sucks his fingers into her mouth.

"Do you like it, Alice?"

"Mm," she mumbles. He withdraws his fingers. "I do. I do."

"Yes, you do," he purrs. "You'd like to stay here forever, wouldn't you? Be a_ good_ Alice."

"Yes."

Something wet between her thighs now, his two fingers from before, pressing against the crotch of her underwear. She spreads her legs a little wider without even really meaning to. A sound escapes from her throat.

"Why are you—why are you doing that?" she asks.

"Because it feels nice. It does feel nice, doesn't it?"

She nods, but she is still unsure. The pressure increases, and she tilts her hips up to meet it.

"My dear Alice… why is a raven like a writing desk?"

"I—" He's still moving his fingers, just rubbing her, up and down with his middle finger. It’s maddeningly slow. "I—I don't know."

"Of course you don't," he giggles. "Nobody does!"

She wants him to take off her underwear—but she doesn't know where that thought comes from. Or why. She whines, chasing after some dormant sensation she's never felt before.

"You are lovely," he sighs, shifting closer, using his other hand to thumb at her chin, then tuck a strand of hair behind her ear.

She meets his eyes, says, _please_, but doesn’t know what she’s asking for.

"My, oh _my_," a voice says—not Mr. Hatter's—that cuts sharply through the fog. She opens her eyes and the basement flashes along her peripheral, blurry and dark, and then she's in the woods again, but it doesn't feel right. The sun is gone, and the sky is grey and hard, like cement. "Would you look at this _spread_."

That's Mr. J's voice. She feels happiness—relief—but it fades just as quickly as it had come, and she realizes she doesn't want him here. She doesn't know why she doesn't, but she knows he doesn't belong here. He isn't supposed to be here.

She watches him saunter closer to their table. She is afraid he is going to eat all of her sweets. These are hers. And Mr. Hatter's. She doesn't want to share. These are for_ her_.

She gasps and shifts, squeezing the arm rests of the chair. Pressure inside her now, a thick finger, her underwear pushed out of the way. It takes her breath away.

Mr. J pauses. "_Jervis_," he says, dangerous, low, "I am a little tired of you always playing with my_ toys_."

"Oh, but it is a _shame_ not to share. She's just delicious—ripe for the taking. _Tight_, too." He redirects his attention back to her. She looks up at him helplessly. Squirming. "Does that feel good, Alice?"

"Y—yes," she nods, panting. She doesn't want him to stop. She should be embarrassed, but she isn't.

There are men emerging from the shadows. Her vision flickers back and forth between the basement and the woods. None of it makes sense. How can she be in one place one second and then in another place the next?

Men in clown masks begin to surround the table. Mr. J is advancing, too. The pressure inside her is removed suddenly. Mr. Hatter's hand slips out from beneath her dress. She goes to speak, but a voice in her head tells her not to.

* * *

"You always spoil the _fun_, don't you, Joker?"

"Me?" he says, with exaggerated incredulity. "I'm just here to join the party. Seems my invitation must have gotten lost in the mail."

"Not lost," Jervis replies. "Never sent," he growls. He is shaking with his fury, angry at having been interrupted. He points a thick finger in the Joker’s direction. "I _told_ you not to kill him."

The Joker tongues at the corner of his mouth for a moment. Choosing his words carefully. "The little blue bird is alive and well, as I remember—"

"But you tried. And he _got away_. Now we have nothing," he snarls. His mouth moves rapidly, his nose scrunching and unscrunching, some sort of angry tick, rabbit-like. "You should be glad I got to her first,” he says, “the things Oswald had _planned_ for her—"

"Mr. Hatter," Taylor interrupts, tugging on his sleeve. "I want to play, like we were before. I want to go back to Wonderland."

Jervis smiles down at her, affectionate. "I know you do, my dear Alice." He pets her hair, careful not to disrupt the headband.

The Joker narrows his eyes. He can taste the way his blood boils inside him, all hot and nasty. His mouth thins into a straight line, and he stares at her. She's looking at him as if she's afraid of him. As if she doesn't know him.

"You know," Jervis continues, rounds to the back of her chair, so he's standing behind her. "You're already too late. Even without the headband, the compound will have rubbed off onto her hair follicles. It only takes a few hours to go into effect. It will have penetrated her mind. _Ruined_ it. You will have nothing—just like I had nothing." He circles to her other side, bending down to murmur in her ear, "Have I ruined you for him, little Alice?"

Taylor nods quickly. "Yes."

Jervis grins from beside her, and the Joker's lip curls into a snarl. The knife is soaring out of his hand before he even realizes he has reached for it. It connects solidly in the pudgy flesh of Jervis's gut, but it's deep. Hopefully he will have punctured the lower lobe of his left lung. Jervis staggers back just as a rain of gunfire comes down from overhead.

The Joker lunges for Taylor and shoves her to the floor beneath the table, shielding her with his own massive bulk. She squirms underneath him, trying to fight him, even then, belly down on the concrete, and he lifts himself off her just enough to rip off the headband, where he sends it skidding across the floor.

His men meet the gunfire head-on, even if they are at the disadvantage being on the ground. He cranes his neck to watch Jervis stagger away, out of the line of gunfire, escaping down a series of hidden steps. The Joker growls.

He's going to kill him for this. He's going to make him wish he was never born. He's going to skin him alive and then feed his own flesh to him, then he’s going to flay the muscle, one thin strip after another, and feed that to him, too. He’s going to snap his tendons. Bleed his veins dry. Then he's going to leave his stinking carcass out to rot and gift it to Batman on a fucking platter.

The Joker drags her along with him beneath the table until they reach the end. It's easy enough to slip out amidst the fray, carrying her into the night while the gunfire bleeds on behind them. He forces her into the back of the van, even as she's screaming. She tries to claw at him. Her fingers almost get stuck in the door when he slams it shut.

"I want to go back. I want to go back!" Tears are streaming down her face. She sobs uncontrollably, beating on the window with her fists. He grips the wheel with both hands and tears through dark streets with one purpose in mind.

He gets her inside, kicking and screaming. He’s never seen her put up this much of a fight. He crowds her into the bathroom. Locks the door. She's fighting him, sobbing, and he bends her over the lip of the bathtub, forcing her head under the faucet. He slams the nozzle up. The water's ice cold, but it might be better that way. He shoves her head beneath the freezing water, and she rears up, but he forces her down with his weight on her back. His large hand cupping the back of her skull. Holding her down. He works quickly—scrapes his gloved hands through her hair, focusing on her scalp. He scrubs her hair _hard_. He'll fucking shave it all off if he has to.

She's still crying. "Stop—_stop_." He can hear her choking on the water, but he doesn't let up. He won't until he's done.

She's shivering uncontrollably by the time he finishes. He shuts off the water. It's quiet, now, save for their breathing, and the _drip, drip, drip_ of her hair. The leaking faucet. They're both soaked. She's still bent over the edge of the tub when he removes his weight. It's like she's paralyzed. She rests her head on the cool floor of the shower, eyes glazed, staring at nothing.

He flicks open his switchblade and cuts open the back of her dress from top to bottom. He doesn't know what chemicals might be on it. Buttons skitter over the bathroom tile in his haste. She whimpers when he peels off the stockings, one leg at a time. The shoes. He strips off her underwear because Jervis had touched it. And then he pauses to look at her, bent over like this, naked and shivering, and thinks about Jervis touching her. The sounds she made. The way her legs were spread for him. Thinks about how long it might have gone on for before he got there. What else Jervis might have done. What other parts of her he might have touched.

His hands clench into fists. His vision is so white with anger he can barely see her.

"I want to go back," she whines.

He cocoons her in a towel. The fight has died out of her, and she's too weak to stand. He should make her vomit the hallucinogen Jervis made her drink, but she'd probably just choke on it on the way back up.

He puts her in his bed. He shouldn't. He pulls a t-shirt over her head, thinks maybe the smell of something familiar will help. He pulls the covers up over her because she’s still shivering.

"I want to go back," she says again. He kneels at the side of the bed, where she is turned to face him, but it's like she doesn't really see him, like she’s looking right through him. He watches a tear slide slowly down her cheek and sink into the pillow. His jaw clenches, involuntary, and he wants to reach down inside her skull and rip out all the gray matter Jervis infected and burn it.

"No, you don't," he says.

He gets up. Paces at the foot of the bed for a long time. The light from the kitchen pours in through the open door, but he keeps to the darkness, looking up sharply at every heavy exhale, every twitch, every little stir.

He finally sits in the cushioned chair in the corner—she likes to curl up here sometimes and draw.

He thinks that he should get boxes. Pack. They'll have to leave after this. Find someplace else. Jervis will want to get his hands on her again. He’ll want to consummate their relationship. Finish her.

He turns his head to look at her, asleep in his bed, and his hatred for her blooms so deeply inside him it’s like the roots for it have always been there, like he was born with them, like he was born hating her. Roots buried so deep they existed even before she did, birthed in fetid soil, thriving in the dark earth. Roots that, now, have tethered themselves to all the intrinsic parts of him, the caverns of his heart, his lungs, the interior vessel of his veins, wound around his sockets and joints. Hatred he can’t get rid of. 

He hates her for following him. Fucking _hates_ her for her flagrant disobedience. Jervis had left their meeting before he had. Had he seen her in the back of the car? Had he made her roll down the window? Had he spoken to her? And then, what Jervis had said earlier, about seeing him in Gotham Heights—the Joker knew in that moment that Jervis had known about her, only he had not realized to what extent. 

He hates her, he _bleeds_ repulsion, and yet, there is satisfaction—_power_—in knowing he touched her first. He put his hands there before Jervis did.

Taylor wakes sometime later, shooting straight up in bed, gasping. It's still dark.

"Mr. J—Mr. J!" 

Relief floods through him, an unusual sensation. He gets up and goes to her.

"Where am I?" she pants.

He doesn't turn on a light. Kneels on one knee next to the bed. "You're right here. With me. It was just a bad dream."

"But I—it was—it was just a dream?"

"Just a dream."

She's still panting, trying to catch her breath. "No, _no_, it felt so real.” He can tell she’s on the verge of crying, starting to hyperventilate, and he reaches for her at the same time she reaches for him, her hand curling around his wrist, his hand gripping her forearm. 

"It wasn't real," he says. It’s important he feeds that lie to her, that she understands that this was something concocted by her own mind. She cannot see this as a failure on his part to keep her safe. She’ll slip away him, she won’t _trust_ him anymore. She’ll start looking somewhere else for the things only_ he_ can give her.

She shudders out a breath. He can feel the goose bumps prickling over her skin.

"I feel sick," she whimpers. He gets up to get her a glass of water, and she guzzles the whole thing in one go. Afterwards, he takes the cup from her. Gently pushes her back down against the pillows. She stares up at him in the darkness.

"Go to sleep. You won't remember in the morning."

"Mr. J?"

"Hm?"

"Don't let anything bad happen to me," she whispers. "I… I need you."

The painfully honest admission is for night only. He knows this is something she could never voice to him in daylight hours, and he savors this truth, in hearing her verbalize it without his prompting.

He moves closer, rests his hands on either side of her head and leans down over her. Their eyes meet in the darkness. He feels enabled. Revived.

"I know you do."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt fill for this chapter was "butterfly in a jar"—the butterflies weren't exactly in a jar, but I hope this will suffice?
> 
> This is my first time writing Jervis Tetch. Trying to insert him into the Nolanverse was a difficult albeit exciting challenge. I hope I did him justice and managed to bring something new to the character you hadn't seen before. He's a creepy bastard, yeah?
> 
> This story is partially adapted from Robin: Year One, where the Mad Hatter's plot to abduct and sell children into slavery is foiled by Dick Grayson. Dick Grayson is practically a baby here—even if he's already adopted the Nightwing moniker. I just imagine the "Robin" thing wouldn't have lasted very long in Nolanverse, and he wouldn't have been taken seriously with a name and costume like that.


	4. Blaze

_“It will feed you, it will ravish you, it will not keep you alive.”_

_—Louise Glück_

It’s freezing in homeroom, the auditorium dark and a little damp, like there might be a leak somewhere. It’s the middle of December, and the air conditioning is set to full blast. Taylor pulls her jacket tighter around her middle, but it’s just a windbreaker, something she picked up after school one day from the thrift store on Belmont. It’s garish. Mustard yellow and maroon. She feels like the condiments that are left out on the tables in restaurants. It’s not cute, but it was three dollars. It cost her more money to take the bus back home afterwards.

She’ll need a new winter jacket soon.

She’s annoyed thinking about it. She is tired of always having to ask Mr. J for things. He’s always given her whatever she’s asked for, as long as it was within reason, but lately she itches with greed—she wants _more_. She wants freedom from always having to ask for his permission first, and she wants to buy things without having to tell him exactly what the money is for.

She still remembers the shame and embarrassment of having to ask him for money for a _bra_, unable to meet his eyes as she did, folding her arms a little higher across her chest than she normally would, as if knowing his gaze would be drawn there.

Mr. J had looked at her, and she swore she caught the tail end of a smirk curled along the corner of his mouth. His dark eyes met hers.

“What for,” he said.

It wasn’t a question.

She narrowed her eyes at him. Jaw clenched. She wanted to punch him.

That was a year ago. She was fifteen then, and she had stormed into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Usually he left her alone when she did that. But that day he followed after her. She was belly-down on her bed, face buried in her pillows. The blinds were open and it was sunny, and it annoyed her that the sun could be so happy when she was not. 

There was the sound of the door clicking open, and then the dip of the mattress, his sudden weight on her back, and her lower back and hips encased between his torso and warm thighs. The taste and smell of him suddenly lodged in her throat—fire and smoke—and the startling warmth of being enveloped in his cocoon. She couldn’t help the involuntary sound of surprise that slipped out. He felt like a sheet of hot steel on her back. She squirmed underneath him to test his strength, and her heart pulsed in her throat when she realized she couldn’t budge, her mouth going bone dry at this simple demonstration of his power.

“I didn’t mean it,” he purred, his hot mouth on her ear.

She had huffed in response, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of giving in, but it came out more shuddery than she had intended.

She felt his long fingers curling over her ribs, her soft belly, and then he was tickling her. She gasped in surprise, but she was defenseless, immediately dissolving into giggles despite her reluctance, Mr. J drawing her laughter out of her with both hands, tickling her until she was breathless from it and begging for him to stop.

“Say ‘mercy’,” he said. He wouldn’t let up.

“Mercy!” she yelled, still trying to twist away from him. She was flipped over onto her back now, tears leaking from her eyes. “Mercy, mercy—!”

He stopped then, smirking down at her, satisfied, his eyes bright dark and glimmering.

She panted beneath him, trying to catch her breath, suddenly hyperaware of the way he was straddling her hips and of where her t-shirt had ridden up, exposing the sharp notches of her rib bones. Her pale belly. She flushed, meeting his eyes, and when she went to pull down her shirt, he captured both of her wrists in one hand. He pulled her arms up over her head, nice and slow as he pinned them to the mattress, almost as if wanting to gauge her reaction, test if she would resist him. She stared up at him, wide-eyed, holding her breath as he carefully slotted his body over hers. His breath was on her neck. His warm lips on her ear. She felt the naked scar on the left side of his face brush up against her cheek. She kept very still.

“So easy,” he murmured. 

Then there was something being pushed into her open palms, and his weight was gone, and she suddenly felt cold without him. He left before she could say anything else, and she was dazed, blinking up at the ceiling, trying to slow her breathing. 

When she lowered her arms and looked at the item Mr. J had pressed into her palm, her lips parted at the sight of a fifty dollar bill.

She wishes now she hadn’t been so idiotic as to spend it all on a stupid _bra_.

The girl two seats over smacks her gum loudly. Taylor can hear all the wet sounds her mouth makes as she chews; she glances over at her, watches her tap on her phone with both thumbs, rapid-fire, her face cast in artificial light that is milky blue, highlighting unpleasant features and crevices. The zit on her jaw. Her double chin. Taylor wonders who she’s texting. What they’re talking about.

She sighs and picks at a loose thread near her thigh, a soft strip of maroon from the velvet auditorium seat. She’s always hated these seats, the way they so eagerly snap back up the moment you go to stand, like the hungry jaws of some wild animal trying to take a bite out of your ass and thighs.

Their guest speaker is either late or caught in the chaos of the blizzard that swirls angrily outside. The snow is blinding. She managed to catch a glimpse of it through the window when shuffling to her next class. They should have canceled school this morning.

There are no windows in the auditorium, just the white, hot lights all pointed at the empty podium on the stage, as if to highlight the fact that nobody is there. The rest of the auditorium is bathed in shadow and dust. It smells like mothballs and old sweat.

She watched a production of _And Then There Were None_ here last fall, remembers marveling at the sets. The costumes. And her classmates, memorizing all those lines, moving across the stage with the practiced ease of someone who had done it a hundred times before. Nobody seemed nervous. Nobody fumbled their lines. Their confidence was breathtaking. She had left that night feeling envious—mystified—wondering how it was possible to bottle up so much confidence, even in the midst of a crowd-hot room, knowing all eyes were on you, knowing your cast mates were depending on you, knowing that the entire production hinged on your ability to do what you were supposed to do.

Two girls stumble into the auditorium late—giggling—and Mr. Delbi from the front row hisses at them to keep it down and then noses back into the_ Gotham Inquirer_. They’re supposed to be using this time to study while they wait for the speaker, but nobody is.

The girls shuffle into the empty seats directly in front of her, and Taylor averts her gaze so they don’t think she’s a freak for staring. She picks at the loose velvet thread, pretends she’s not listening.

“I don’t know why they’re making us come to this stupid thing,” the girl on the left says, a half-hearted whisper. She has her long blonde hair put up in smooth ponytail that cascades down her back. She pulls down the seat and heaves a sigh as she sinks into it. “I already know what college I’m going to.”

“Yeah, the University of Sucking Dick,” her friend mutters. Her brown hair is piled on top of her head in a messy bun, and she’s wearing gray sweatpants that she’s tucked inside her fur-lined UGG boots. She bends to reach into her backpack, and Taylor stares at all the handmade bracelets on her wrist, a braided rainbow of color.

“Ha, ha.”

The girl with the bracelets pulls out a pack of gum. She takes one for herself and then offers one to her friend. “I still can’t believe your parents are going to let you go there. It’s a party school.”

“Yeah, but it’s close to home, so they don’t care. They’ll come visit on the weekends or whatever.”

“Just so long as you’re not doubled over the toilet in some frat house puking your guts up.”

The blonde girl shoots her a look. “You’re so crass sometimes.” She snatches the stick of gum. “At least I know where I’m going.”

The rest of their conversation peters out when Mr. Delbi jumps up from his seat and offers an overeager handshake to the woman who just entered from the bottom left of the auditorium.

She doesn’t know what the speaker is here to talk about, but from the conversation she’s just overhead, she guesses it has to do with applying to college.

She bites her lower lip and sinks a little farther down into her seat. The woman is pretty. Young. She introduces herself as a college admissions counselor for GSU. She looks out at the pockets of students scattered throughout the auditorium, some with their feet propped on the seats in front of them, some still texting on their phones. A kid near the back is passed out with his neck arched at an awkward angle, hoodie pulled low over his eyes, one loose earbud dangling near his chin. Taylor looks back at the counselor and is overcome with such overwhelming secondhand embarrassment that she can feel her own face growing hot. She is sorry for her, standing there at the podium, looking hopeful and bright-eyed, her jacket-skirt combo just a little too big, almost boxy. Her flats make her look like a little girl. Maybe this is the first time she’s done this.

Taylor listens, but only because nobody else is and she doesn’t want the counselor to feel discouraged. She thinks the woman might look at her a couple of times, but it’s hard to tell for sure because of the glare from the woman’s glasses. Taylor offers a feeble smile of encouragement anyway. She’d hate to stand up in front of these people, knows she would wither under such intense disinterest, the hot scrutiny of bored, judgmental stares.

The bell rings, but the counselor isn’t finished. She hurries through her final parting spiel, but everyone is already getting out of their seats, stretching their arms over their heads, yawning open-mouthed, gathering their books, backpacks, pocketing their cell phones. The counselor tells everyone she has pamphlets if they’re interested. Nobody is.

Taylor bites her lip and watches everyone leave. The girls in front of her left their gum wrappers shriveled on the floor, and the silver wrappers gleam in the dim light, looking like the warped, hard shells of a beetle or some other shiny insect. She waits a minute to shoulder her backpack, and then she ambles down the aisle towards the stage.

Mr. Delbi is talking to the counselor about something, energetic in the way he way he moves his arms—covered in a thick blanket of dark, wiry hair—and the woman looks mildly uncomfortable, nodding stiffly, but polite. She doesn’t see Taylor approach at first, but then she glances over Mr. Delbi’s shoulder and seems relieved. 

“Hi there!” she says. She uncrosses her arms and steps off the stage to meet her. She is even prettier up close. Blonde hair and blue eyes. She has dimples in her cheeks and a tiny, cute nose. Taylor’s always liked girls with small features—probably because all of hers are so big and too loud. “Were you interested in applying to GSU?”

Taylor nods even though she’s not. She’s never thought about applying to college—she’s never thought about _college_.

“That’s great!” she says. “What are you looking to major in?”

Taylor reaches for her own elbow and holds on because she doesn’t know what to do with her hands.

“I don’t know,” she says, and then clears her throat and says it again when it comes out quiet and croaky. She hasn’t said anything to anyone all day.

“That’s okay,” the woman says, smiling. She’s so bright she would put a forest fire to shame. “You still have time to decide. What kinds of things are you interested in?”

Taylor blinks, mildly panicked by the question. She doesn’t know what kinds of things she’s interested in. She likes food, especially sweet things, like the gummi candies you sink your teeth into and the goo inside bursts all over your tongue, first sour, and then sweet. She likes when it’s summer, especially that one time Mr. J took her to Cape May and she got to swim in the Atlantic. Her first time in the ocean. Her hair full of salt, her skin tight and warm from an entire day spent playing in the sun. He had watched her play in the waves for hours—maybe the one truly kind thing he has ever done for her, that trip—sitting in the sand, knees pulled up to his chest, legs spread so he could drape his forearms across the hills of his knees.

She thinks that she likes waking up early sometimes and feeling Mr. J still in bed behind her, big and warm and safe. And she likes gently plucking the steel guitar strings in the band room when no one’s paying attention, likes the feel of the vibrations under her fingertips, their soft hum. She likes bending down to pet the black cat with milky white paws, the one with the tip of its left ear chewed off who lazes outside the convenience store she gets candy from sometimes. She likes watching Logan play softball after school. And she likes when Mr. J stands behind her in the kitchen when she’s making something to eat, gently skirts his knuckles along the knobs of her spine, looking over her shoulder like he’s interested in what she’s doing when she knows he just wants to touch her. She really likes that.

“I don’t know,” she shrugs. She digs her fingernails into her elbow, feels the prick of her nails through her jacket. “I like to draw, I guess.” She draws on the back of old homework assignments that have already been graded and returned to her, using colored pencils she borrowed from school. She wants one of those sketchbooks with buttercream paper, thick enough that markers won’t bleed through—but they’re expensive, and there’s always other things to spend money on.

“That’s great!” she says again, like that’s her automatic response to everything. “Have you ever thought about majoring in art?”

Taylor bites her lip. “Like, be an artist?”

“Sure!” she says. “Why not? There are lots of things to do with an art degree.”

“Oh.” She is still chewing on her lower lip, where her teeth have left little indentations. She looks up at Mr. Delbi who is still on the stage, staring at her. He looks annoyed. She reddens. “I’m really not that good.”

“Well, GSU has a great art program, our professors are some of the best in the state—”

Taylor nods, finally releasing her lower lip from the sharp prison of her teeth. The counselor is friendly, but she really wants to go now. She doesn’t know why anxiety prickles up her spine all the sudden, why she feels clammy, why her intestines feel as though they’ve twisted themselves into a tangle of wet knots, why bile crawls hot and unwanted up her throat.

“I have to go,” she blurts, interrupting the woman’s speech.

The counselor’s brows pull together, concerned. Taylor feels awful for being so rude.

“That’s okay,” she says, not unkind. “I know you have to get to class. Let me just give you one of these.” She steps back to the stage and reaches for one of the promised pamphlets, and then digs in her purse for a moment. She comes back to Taylor and offers the items to her. “Here’s my card if you have any questions, you can call me or even text.” She looks at Taylor and offers a smile, a smaller one, one that almost looks a little sad, like she already knows she won’t be hearing from her again. “My email’s there, too,” she says.

Taylor nods. She takes the pamphlet and the cream-colored card and hurries up the aisle, desperate to escape the hot lights, the dank smell of the leaky auditorium. Mr. Delbi’s irritated frown and his ugly, hairy arms.

Her next two classes pass in a blur. She doesn’t remember them. She can’t stop thinking about the counselor’s questions and her startling inability to formulate an answer. What _does _she want to do when she grows up? What does she want to study? Where does she want to go? Who does she want to _be_?

And why has she never thought about these things before? Did she think she was going to live with Mr. J for the rest of her life? Did she think she wouldn’t have to work, that he’d take care of her and she’d never have to worry about anything ever again? Has she really been so consumed—so obsessed—with chasing after his love and attention that she hasn’t given any time to cultivating her own self? Has everything she’s ever done, everything she’s ever felt and thought and said, has it all been in hapless pursuit of Mr. J? Did her own desires outside of his orbital sphere ever even exist?

She feels nauseous the whole way home, and it takes forever; the busses are delayed and there’s an accident in Colgate Heights that’s slowed down traffic. Everyone is on high alert because of the snow storm, which is poised to worsen overnight. She gets home two hours later than usual. It’s already dark outside. She leaves her backpack on the floor underneath the counter. Doesn’t care that she tracks slush into the house. She kicks off her sneakers at the foot of her bed. She’ll do her homework later.

Mr. J isn’t home yet, but that isn’t unusual. Sometimes she likes to have dinner ready for him by the time he gets back—she knows he likes that—but she doesn’t think she can stomach anything right now, and unease still slithers around in her belly like it can’t find a comfortable place to lay its head down and rest.

She’s still thinking about the counselor, and college, but she doesn’t want to. Her sudden self-awareness for her own naivety is startling—it frightens her. She feels stupid. Ashamed. She thinks of the two girls who had sat in front of her in homeroom, the next step of their lives all planned out—not perfect, but still pretty. In retrospect, Taylor’s future barely extends into tomorrow, as even that isn’t promised to her. She doesn’t live in constant fear of Mr. J killing her, not anymore, but she knows someday this will all end, that eventually he will get bored with her, that she will have served her purpose. They aren’t soulmates. They’re soul _something_, tethered together by some tenuous thread of his own design, but they’re not bound for eternity like certain other lovers are. What they have will not be kept alive by memory, and one day it will be forgotten—she knows she’ll take their love with her when she goes, to some place where it will cease to exist entirely, because it has to. Her love for him is pure, without restraint, and yet sometimes she feels so full of sin she is sick with it, forced to perform regular purges of her own self-disgust. She knows she loves a monster. She knows she’s _wrong_ for loving him. She knows there is no room for that kind of depravity in Heaven, and even Hell will throw her out. Even _they_ will not want her. _You’re unwelcome here_, they’ll tell her. She’ll exist only in the tepid in-between, an imagined space—maybe there her love for him can finally thrive, where it can bloom unhindered, unburdened by the inherent toils of good or evil. Some place where it might be allowed to just _be_.

She stares at her unmade bed, where the sheets look cold and unfriendly. She ends up falling into the couch instead, curled up into a ball, facing the back cushions. The snow comes down heavy outside. It’s quiet. Lonely. She sleeps harder than she has in a long time.

She doesn’t know why she’s so tired lately, why it’s so hard to stay awake. It’s the kind of exhaustion that’s burrowed somewhere so deep inside her she can’t pinpoint its exact source. Sometimes it’s a challenge just to make it through the day. She naps almost every day when she gets home from school, and when she wakes she’s still on top of the covers with her shoes on. She thinks maybe it’s because it gets darker earlier in the day now. Sometimes Mr. J will be home when she wakes, and her bedroom door will be open a little wider than she had left it. Other time when she wakes, he isn’t there, and she spends the evening trying to focus on her homework, though her mind wanders, and some of her homework is hard to do without access to a computer.

A little while later, she wakes from a dreamless sleep, feeling groggy and stiff. She sits up and stretches her arms, yawning, and when she’s done she sees that the light under the stove in the kitchen is on, and she knows Mr. J is home. She slips off the couch and goes to him. The door to his bedroom creaks when she pushes it open. He’s sitting at the desk that’s pushed up against the far wall, the gooseneck lamp pitched low, illuminating a small patch of splintered wood and the furled corner of a map. She always wonders what he’s working on when he sits there at night, hunched over for hours at a time, but she knows better than to ask.

“Mr. J?” she says, a little tentative, because she’s not sure if it’s okay to interrupt.

He spins around in his chair, slowly, and she swallows when she sees he’s in his face paint, though patches of skin are starting to peel through. His jacket hangs off the back of the chair. His vest is on the floor. It helps some, seeing him stripped down like this, to his shirt and suspenders, but she’s still frightened—uneasy—still has to make a conscious effort not to take a step back.

She realizes then that he’s not looking at her, his eyes drawn instead to his lap, where she sees that he’s clutching the pamphlet to GSU she’d gotten at school. She must have left it on the counter. He does look up at her then, and his heavy eyes on her make her mouth part with uncertainty. Fear. She’ll never get used to the intensity of his eyes, especially when they’re slathered in black. Seeing him like this—it’s like every time is the first time.

“Big plans?” he asks, cocking his head—just slight, just enough for her to know that she should phrase her reply very carefully.

“I—no. No.” She steps in front of him now. She doesn’t want him looking at that. She doesn’t know why it makes her nervous, him knowing about GSU. Why it feels like a window is closing before it was ever really open. She hugs her own waist. “I mean, not really. It was just this thing at school. I had to go. They gave me one of those. I meant to throw it away.” 

She tries to make it sound flippant. Mr. J’s head cocks even further, and she knows from the dark glimmer in his eyes he can see straight through her lie. She doesn’t even know why she’s lying about it, why it’s so bad for him to know. There’s no reason why her possibly going to college has to be a secret. Right?

Mr. J doesn’t say anything. Something in the air feels charged, though, like one wrong move and she might find herself pinned on the floor beneath him. She ventures another step closer.

She goes to take it from him, tentative, but she is surprised when he doesn’t relinquish his grip. She looks at him, brows drawn together in confusion.

“Why don’t you let me hold onto this,” he says, “since you won’t be needing it. Hm?” He tosses it somewhere on the desk behind him. She tracks its movement as it slides across the desk, and somehow she’s knows that’s the last time she’ll be seeing it. With his other hand, he pats his lap. “Come here. _Sit_.”

She exhales through her nose. Tries not to let the shock of his request show, even though she knows it’s written all over her face. She steps closer, and she lets him pull her into his lap, where she sits on his thigh, like the way you would with Santa at the mall or something. She shifts a little, and he curls an arm around her waist. Casual.

“Am I in trouble?” she asks. “Did I do something wrong?”

“_No_, pumpkin. No. Of course not,” he assures, and Taylor bites her lip, searching his eyes. “I’m, uh, just _surprised_, is all, that you’d want to leave your Mr. J—”

“I don’t!” she blurts. No. She doesn’t want him to think that.

“No?”

“No… no. I don’t want to leave.” Her words bleed sincerity. Sincerity that is so honest and unflinching it’s almost painful. Honesty that is unfettered, uncontained. It embarrasses her, sometimes, how much she would give to him. How much she has already given. “I want to stay here. With you.”

“Yes,” he says. His eyes burn her, but she can’t look away. “Yes, you do. You know I’ll take care of you, don’t you?”

She nods. She feels his arm slip lower, his hand trailing further down, until it rests on her hip. She feels him skirting the hem of her shirt up, and she shudders when she feels his bare fingers there, tracing over her ruined flesh, the place where he had permanently staked his claim. It feels like a lifetime ago. It feels like yesterday.

He leans closer, fits his mouth near the shell of her ear. “Don’t want you forgetting who you belong to.”

She nods. Unable to speak. Her heart thuds in her ears. It feels so good, the warmth of his hand there, searing through her flesh, like he’s branding her for a second time. She forgot how good it feels to be wanted. Owned.

“Please keep touching me there,” she whispers.

She meets his eyes only briefly, searching for the whites in his eyes inside all that black, and then he’s pulling her against him, further up his thigh, so she’s flush to his abdomen. She dares to reach up. Winds her arms around his neck.

He lets her.

He traces the J with two fingers, then switches to his thumb, and she can do nothing but cling to him, let him touch her. She lays her head on his collarbone, exhales against his neck. Closes her eyes, lost in the sensation. The rough pads of his fingers awaken a prickling wave of goose bumps beneath their touch.

She hears the wet sounds his mouth makes when he licks his lips. Feels him exhale, the slight way his chest expands and then recedes.

Of course she doesn’t want to leave him. She never wants this to end. She squeezes her eyes shut, wishing she could just be in the moment and enjoy it, but it’s hard when she spends so much time prematurely dreading the second it’ll end. 

She wakes sometime later, when he shifts. She blinks into the darkness, smells gasoline and something else, maybe sweat. She forgets where she is for a second, hadn’t even realized she had fallen asleep. She lifts her head from the crook of his neck and looks up at him, sheepish. His hand is still under her shirt, the warm, rough skin of his palm covering the J in its entirety, pressed so tight it’s almost as if he hopes to absorb the brand into his own skin. He looks down at her with an expression she can’t read.

“Sorry,” she murmurs. “I don’t know why I’m so tired all the time.” She rubs the sleep from her eyes with both fists and has to wait a minute for the fuzz to clear out. She doesn’t want to break this spell, but she knows they can’t stay like this forever, and she is always afraid of pushing her affection towards him just one step too far. She makes a point of always withdrawing first, before he has the chance. A little piece of her heart always breaks off when he pushes her way, so she always removes herself from his embrace before he can. 

She slides off his lap. Hopes he isn’t angry. She stands in front of him and clasps her arms behind her back. He goes back to his work. She knows she’s taken up his time, knows that it’s late now, but she can’t help but wonder why he didn’t wake her sooner.

“Good night, Mr. J.” She bites her lip, and when it becomes clear he is not going to echo it back to her, she leaves.

In the doorway, his voice stops her in her tracks.

“You wouldn’t get in, you know.”

She turns around to face him, holding onto the edge of the doorframe.

“Your ar_t_,” he clarifies. “It’s not good enough.”

She swallows down her disappointment, which tastes even more bitter than usual. “Oh.”

He gets up, and she watches him approach. “The truth hurts, princess. But it’s better you hear it from me. Don’t want you getting your hopes up for no reason.”

She takes a small step back as he advances. “Oh… okay.”

He grins at her, but it feels full of condescension. Mirth.

“Sweet dreams,” he says. 

He shuts the door in her face.

She stares at the closed door, and her shoulders sag with the sharp sting of rejection, and something else, something that feels almost like betrayal, although she can’t figure out why.

In her room, she changes into her pajamas. Slips under the covers. She sleeps in her own bed that night. And she refuses to cry.

* * *

It’s almost Christmas. But finals first, and then winter formal after the near year. 

Mr. J has been more affectionate than usual of late, ever since he found the college brochure. One night he brings her home a box of hot chocolate which she immediately sets to making, heaping a generous helping of fluffy marshmallows on top after the chocolate powder is all stirred, and when she offers him a sip from her mug, he accepts, much to her surprise and delight. It makes her heart race when she watches him touch his lips to the mug where she had just put hers—and then moments later, when he returns it to her, for her lips to touch where his had been. They share a look, and she wonders if he knows what she’s thinking about, if he is lit up with the same thrill. 

And a few nights later, he joins her on the couch. She’s lying down, watching Home Alone, her homework abandoned on the coffee table. It’s a cold, rainy evening. The rain has turned all the snow to slush, impossible mountains of it stacked in the school parking lot, the kind that’ll freeze into hard chunks and then take weeks to melt, and brown walls of it are piled waist-high on the sides of the road, hurriedly shoved out of the way. It’s supposed to snow again later. It’s like it never stops.

Mr. J is dressed down—his face stripped free of paint, completely bare. He’s wearing brown pants. A black t-shirt. It’s the first time she’s ever seen him in black before, and she tries not to stare. She’s always thought he was handsome, even if the idea of having such a thought has always felt too taboo to acknowledge. It feels wrong, somehow, to admit her attraction to him, even if it’s a constant thought in her peripheral mind. It _is_ wrong. She knows she’s shouldn’t like him. And yet, there is an undeniable thrill she gets from knowing that he might like her a little bit, too. She likes feeling wanted by him. Likes feeling needed.

_Don’t want you forgetting who you belong to. _

She doesn’t mind his scars—they fascinate her, especially when she gets to see them bare and up close. She thinks sometimes his eyes are a little too intense, too frightening, and she supposes she doesn’t really like his teeth, but she likes when he smiles at her, the way his eyes light up, likes knowing she is at the center of his undivided attention. And sometimes she wishes he would wash his hair more often, but she does really like his arms—surprisingly tanned—and his hands, which are so much bigger and stronger than hers. His calloused palms and the pads of his fingertips. She likes the warmth that radiates off him, fire-hot, like he’s lit up from the inside by some invisible furnace. And she likes that in the sunlight, sometimes his eyes look chocolate brown instead of black, and she likes the way his hair curls at the nape of his neck, and the little curls around his ears. And she likes his mouth, the things he is always doing with it. She likes how he can never hold himself completely still. She likes when he teases her, or when he makes her blush. She likes the length of his body, his long legs, and the shifting muscles in his thighs when he’s pressed up against her. She likes him hovering just a little too close, especially when they’re in public, some part of him always touching her, like he knows she’s touch-starved and needs physical contact. His upper arm pressed against her shoulder, his knee touching hers when they’re sitting side by side, or the way he locks his legs with hers beneath a table if they’re across from each other, kind of playful, kind of territorial, like he thinks someone might come and snatch her away if he doesn’t. The way he bends to touch his forehead to hers sometimes, smiling, and it feels like a secret when it’s like that, like his grin is meant just for her. She likes that he smells like gasoline and smoke, even if she doesn’t like to imagine why he smells that way.

He plops down near the arm rest with enough force to disrupt the cushions, and then he’s pulling her into his lap, so she’s laid out across his thighs, her head pillowed on the arm rest. She turns a little to look at him, but he’s staring ahead at the TV, so she does too. She sinks her fingers into the cushions when she feels him sift a heavy hand through her hair. She has her hair in a ponytail, and he pulls it free so it fans out across her shoulders and back. He scrapes his fingernails against her scalp, and it feels so good her toes curl in her socks. She tries to remain indifferent, but she’s afraid he can feel where her heart beats feverishly against his thigh.

They’re at the scene where the two bumbling burglars slip through a pile of little toy cars at the bottom of the staircase.

Kevin crouches victoriously at the top. _“You guys give up, or are you thirsty for more?” _

Taylor bites her bottom lip. It’s hard to focus with his nails scraping through her scalp like that. Hard not to go completely boneless and just close her eyes, sink into the sensation.

Mr. J has been more affectionate with her, but he’s also been more generous with her allowance as well. She’s been able to buy more food, and she even saved up to buy a new pair of jeans, a couple of tops. The jeans are nice—brand new, not secondhand—and they fit her like a glove. She’s never worn something that hugged her thighs so much. Her favorite new shirt is something floral—white, with blue flowers—and little scalloped sleeves. There are strings that tie in a thin bow in the back. It’s feminine. Pretty. She feels older when she wears it, more mature.

She knows Mr. J notices, too. She sees him just before she steps out the door for school one morning, having woken up late, and she’s hyperaware of his gaze on her, lingering for longer than usual. She feels naked—exposed—beneath the weight of his gaze, and she hurries to put on her coat. When she opens the door, it suddenly slams closed in front of her. Mr. J behind her, his arm outstretched next to her head. She spins around to look at him, afraid he’ll make her change or something, like some overbearing parent. He wouldn’t do that, would he?

“Aren’t you going to say _goodbye_?” he prompts, unsmiling.

“Oh—yeah.” He still has one arm propped above her, the flat of his palm pressed against the door, and she awkwardly moves in and folds her arms around his waist in a hug.

He doesn’t hug back.

“I’ll see you later,” she says when she lets go, a little unsure.

“See you later, doll face.”

He removes his arm from the door and cuffs her chin, but it doesn’t feel as affectionate as it usually does. He watches her until she’s out of sight—she knows because she cranes her neck to look back at him when she’s on the sidewalk, some fifty yards away, and sees that he’s still standing in the open doorway.

The exchange unnerves her, him demanding her attention like that. She doesn’t understand it.

On Friday, he tells her to cut school. Fridays she has art history with Logan, the only class they share together this semester. She frowns at him in the kitchen, where she’s bent down near the door to lace up her shoes. Her backpack’s already on. The bus is coming any minute.

“Why?” she blurts, which is probably the wrong thing to ask.

There’s something predatory in his eyes, something that sets her on edge.

“Because I _want _you to,” he says. She sits up when he approaches, and he tugs on her backpack. She lets him slide it off her shoulders, and then watches as he tosses it near the closet door. Out of the way. She looks up at him.

“Okay,” she says, her heart pattering a little faster at the thought of him wanting her to stay home so he can spend more time with her.

But he doesn’t want to stay home. He piles her into the car with a sly smile, quiet about their destination as they drive a half hour in the snow. It’s been a while since she’s been this deep into the city, and she enjoys seeing it lit up, all the shops decorated for Christmas, garland and velvet red ribbons and shiny bows, pretty Christmas tree displays and golden lights strung in the windows. The hustle and bustle of people, all the briefcases and purses and colorful shopping bags. She likes seeing everything coated in a fresh blanket of snow, the sky overcast and grey. She feels cozy in the warm car with Mr. J. Safe. Blanketed by snow, sandwiched on all sides by skyscrapers and other city buildings. Mr. J rests his arm on the center console, and she does the same, laying her arm next to his as she stares at the passing blur of gray and white, watching the snow fall. She has a flash of déjà vu, being here in the car with him, all this snow—but she cannot pinpoint the exact memory.

They park in some nondescript parking garage, and she still has no idea where they are or where they’re going. She’s practically vibrating with excitement as they squeeze into the elevator.

“Please just tell me,” she whines. She knows she’s being obnoxious and a little petulant, but she just wants to know.

“You’ll _see_.”

“Will I like it?” she perks up, even though she already knows she will.

He pretends to think about it, narrowing his eyes in thought.

She tugs on his arm in exasperation, not usually so hands-on with him, but for once she feels like he won’t mind. “Come on! Just tell me!”

The elevator door chimes when they reach the first floor, and when the doors slide open, her face breaks into a smile, hardly believing what she sees. She can’t help but to do a little jump, clasping her hands near in chest in excitement. She turns to face him. 

“We’re going to the aquarium?” she squeals. She’s never been before—but maybe he knew that. She thinks she might have told him once before, a long time ago. She can’t believe he remembered.

She bites down on her lower lip, giddy as she wraps him in a tight hug. She closes her eyes and smiles with her face pressed against his chest. 

“Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

She grabs his hand and tugs him towards the entrance where he shells out the money to pay for their tickets. She giggles, and she feels like a little kid when she steps inside the dome-shaped lobby, the way the room opens around her, everything so massive. It’s all she can do to take everything in, her eyes wide with amazement. There’s a Christmas tree in the center of the room—the biggest she’s ever seen—that nearly touches the skylight. The ornaments are all different kinds of sea animals; sharks and penguins and crabs, seals and stingrays and seahorses. The lights blink blue and gold. The ribbon wrapped around the tree is made of faux seaweed, and instead of gifts, there are plush stuffed animals beneath the tree, little otters and penguins and dolphins. Her face lights up at the sight of it. She hopes Mr. J will let her get one of those from the gift shop later.

She eagerly pulls him into the first exhibit, a black room with low-set ceilings, a winding room the shape of a large S, displaying all the different species of jellyfish. He follows behind her at a slight distance as she moves from one display to the next. She stops to read all the plaques, silent for several long moments before piping up to excitedly share some interesting fact or tidbit.

“Did you know that jellyfish don’t have brains? That’s so weird!” and, “Wow, Mr. J, look at this one!” as she eagerly ushers him closer.

There are cylindrical glass tubes housing some smaller, more delicate jellyfish that stretch from floor to ceiling scattered throughout the room, and she slides up to one to stare at a tiny pink jellyfish barely the size of her pinky finger. She watches it for a long time, tracking its easy, languid movements, thinking about how content it looks, floating there in the still, blue water, it’s long, slender tendrils floating like silk. She wonders how they don’t all get tangled.

Her eyes lose focus for a moment and she looks beyond the jellyfish to the other side of the glass, where she notices Mr. J staring at her. She hadn’t realized he had been standing there. She flushes and goes to the other side to meet him, a little embarrassed at having been caught in such a mesmerized trance.

“Let’s keep going,” she says.

He lets her drag him to every exhibit, even the dolphin show, where they sit on the bleachers in the back so they don’t get splashed. The shark portion of the aquarium takes some coaxing on her own part, and she paces around the entrance while Mr. J patiently waits for her to make up her mind. She kind of likes it once they’re inside. The tanks are huge, and the room is massive, a sprawling, dark labyrinth of tanks to wind around. Their feet barely make any sound on the carpet, and everything is dark and blue and kind of ethereal. She feels like she’s underwater. She doesn’t get close enough to read all the plaques this time, clinging to Mr. J instead, catching him on the back of his heels more than once, her hand curled around his forearm as the sharks glide through the water on either side of them, smooth and powerful, like they’re barely exerting any effort at all.

“You know,” he says, drawing her out of a murky reverie, “they say sharks can smell blood from up to three miles away.” He throws it to her over his shoulder after a long period of silence has passed, and she’s clipped the back of his heel for the sixth time.

She swallows, unnerved by this information. “That’s so creepy.”

Artificial beams of pale sunlight filter through the tank on her left, and she watches for a moment as the stripes ripple over her forearms. The light is cold.

Mr. J stops halfway down the carpeted ramp to stare at a passing shark, and she nearly bumps into his back. He looks down at her after the shark has glided away. The right side of his face is bathed in an ethereal blue light from the tank. She can’t help but stare for a moment at the furled edges of scar tissue, the deep crevices that have been crudely sewn shut. She fights the urge to reach out and run her fingers over it.

“They’d like you,” he says, leaning down suddenly—too close—his voice pitched low, a conspiratorial whisper meant just for the two of them. “Your blood’s _sweet_.”

Taylor blinks up at him, and she meets his gaze head on. It’s intense. Unnerving. She knows he’s just teasing—but there’s a flicker of doubt when she is thrust into the memory of his bloodied fingerprints on the sheets, waking up to a pool of her own blood. She hasn’t allowed herself the terrifying possibility to wonder _what if_ until now. What if he had touched her while she slept? What if he had put his fingers _inside_ her? What if he had touched her and then licked his fingers clean—_tasted_ her?

_"Why do you always look at me like that?" _

_"Like what?"_

_"Like… like you want to eat me."_

_"Don't know about that. Don't know what you _taste _like."_

Does he know, now? Had he coated himself with her essence? Taken her inside his mouth?

She sees a flash of those ruined sheets in her mind’s eye—her brain helpfully having stored an image of it there, one she’ll probably never get rid of—and she has to make a conscious effort not to wither beneath the overwhelming weight of his gaze. He has a way of bearing down on her when he looks at her like that, until the world and all its edges in her peripheral begin to fade, until all she sees is him, and nothing else.

She has to ignore the possible implications of his statement. It’s easier this way. So she laughs but it’s short. Clipped.

“Blood’s not sweet…” she mumbles, trying for exasperation in her tone as she brushes past him. He doesn’t say anything in response. She stops when she’s on the opposite side of the ramp, where they’re separated by the handrail, and he towers above her on the higher strip.

“Are you coming?” she asks.

He looks down at her. “I will be.”

She furrows her brows a little at the way his eyes glitter, thinks she sees the tail end of a smirk, but she can’t be sure. She finishes the rest of the exhibit alone, Mr. J always just one room behind her, and she keeps catching him in her peripheral each time she steps into a new room and he enters the old one. It makes her spine curl, the way he looks at her from a distance, and something hot pools in her lower belly, something she doesn’t think she’s ever felt before. She marvels at the way she can still feel the electrifying heat of his presence, even when she can’t see him. There’s something cat-and-mouse about it that makes her heartbeat throb in her ears. She wonders if she could hide from him in here, if he’d find her in this shifting blue labyrinth. 

Mr. J’s dark eyes aren’t the only ones that track her. She can’t help but feel like the sharks are following her, too, studying her with their shifting, beady eyes. It feels predatory. Like she’s being hunted.

She doesn’t see Mr. J when she enters the last room. She turns in a full circle, afraid that she’s somehow missed him. She exits the exhibit feeling confused and a little worried. Has he left her? Where would he go if—

A warm hand curls around her nape, and she knows it’s him. She spins around to face him, relieved.

“I couldn’t find you,” she says.

He cocks his head at her. He keeps his hand cupped around the back of her neck. “I was right behind you the whole time, princess,” he says innocently. With his other hand, he reaches up and presses a finger against the space between her eyes. “Maybe you need _glasses_.”

She swats his hand away and ducks to hide her smile. He grins at her. 

Their last stop is the gift shop, which Taylor flits around excitedly, jumping from one display to the next. She wants everything, but she doesn’t want to be greedy. She picks out a plush sea otter. She saw it under the Christmas tree in the main lobby, and it’s so cute and soft, and it’s clutching an orange starfish between its furry paws. When the cashier goes to put in the bag, Taylor reaches for it instead. She hugs it to her chest the whole way to the car. She can’t stop smiling.

She sighs once they’re on the road, the city soft and white and quiet. Snow is falling again. She turns up the heat and cuddles her sea otter.

“This has been the best day ever,” she exclaims, happy but exhausted.

“You think so, huh?”

She nods. She tells him about all of her favorite animals on the way home. She doesn’t shut up the whole hour it takes to get there—bumper to bumper traffic—but he listens to all of it. He gets her a cheeseburger. She munches her food happily and shares some of her fries.

She falls asleep on the couch when they get home. It’s six PM, so it’s already dark out. She wakes up a couple hours later, cold and a little disoriented. All the lights are off. She sits up and rubs the dark out of her eyes. She shivers as she tiptoes to the bathroom. Her pajamas are still there from the night before, on the floor, so she puts them on and brushes her teeth.

In the hallway, with her stuffed otter tucked under one arm, she pauses, her gaze sliding between Mr. J’s closed door and her own. She thinks about the way he had looked at her in the shark exhibit. What he had said to her about her blood being sweet. Thinks about how nice he’s been to her lately, all the stuff he’s given her, her increase in allowance. How much he touches her now, always initiating contact when before it was so rare, or she had to be the one to touch him first.

And she thinks about GSU, how she couldn’t find the pamphlet after he’d taken it from her—and she’d _looked_. Why would he throw it away? Doesn’t he want her to go to school? Does he really not think she’d make it, that she’s not good enough—or is it something else?

It’s all so confusing. She sighs as she goes to her own room. Slips under sheets that are ice cold, pulling them up to her chin. She tries to sleep, but can’t, too wound up from the day. She fades in and out of dreams. She’s in a forest, and she’s chasing after a little white rabbit. It disappears down a narrow hole in the ground, and she doesn’t know if she can fit through, but she tries.

It hurts, but she manages to squeeze through the opening. On the other side, everything is upside down, but the colors are brighter, and the air is sweet. She’s happy here, she thinks, or she will be. She knows she is looking for somebody, but she doesn’t know who. She feels like they’re just around the bend, just behind this tree, but every time she turns, there is no one there. Is she going the wrong way? Maybe if she just—

She startles out of her dream when something warm settles in behind her. She jerks awake, feels Mr. J fitting himself behind her. An arm curls over her waist. He pulls her back against him.

“Go back to sleep,” he murmurs.

She pants, out of breath, startled at having been woken up. She grips the forearm that’s draped across her. He’s never come to her bed before. She doesn’t understand.

“I—I had a bad dream,” she whimpers, confused. She feels so disoriented.

“I know.”

She tries to relax into his embrace as her breath returns. Guilt piles itself all around her, and when the weight of it is finally too much to bear, it lays itself down next to her instead, in a way that makes it impossible to ignore. She stares, wide-eyed, into the blackness of her bedroom.

She doesn’t know who or what it was she was looking for her in dream, but she knows with startling, terrifying certainty that it wasn’t Mr. J.

_To be continued in Part ll…_


	5. Blaze, Part ll

_"Fire licks me, blazing and alive.”_

_—Nika Turbina_

Christmas Eve.

Taylor buys lights for her bedroom—a multicolored strand of red and blue and green and gold—that she drapes over the two windows the head of her bed is butted against. She turns off all the other lights and sits with her back to the headboard, lets the pinkish red glow bathe the sketchpad balanced on the flat of her thighs, which are drawn up to her chest. Her colored pencils are scattered on the sheets next to her. Christmas break has been nice so far. Mr. J hasn't been home much, which disappoints her, but she's kept busy without him. She's already finished all the homework that was due to be completed during break, and she spends most of her time puttering around the house or watching TV or drawing. She snoops through some of Mr. J's things when he isn't home, careful not to disrupt his workspace, but everything is so messy she doesn't think he'll notice anyway. She sifts through old newspapers, some with chunks of text or even entire pages ripped out. She wonders what he's done with them. And the map of Gotham he'd pinned to the wall behind the desk. She leans closer, wonders what all the pushpins mean, and why there's one directly on top of her school.

At some point, she digs out an old boom box from the closet in Mr. J's room, and if she positions the antenna just right she can pick up a crackly AM station, some orchestra playing Christmas music. It's old, cathedral-style music—very 'Hallowed be Thy Name'—and she leaves it on the kitchen counter and listens to it from her bedroom while she sketches.

It's a little lonely, being by herself on Christmas Eve, but she's used to being alone on Christmas, or just not celebrating it at all. Most of her foster families were too poor to make sure everyone got gifts, most families fostering five or six kids at a time, where the priority then became food and making sure everyone had a place to sleep. She spent one winter curled up in a sleeping bag on the concrete floor in the basement, tucked next to the boiler, with three or four other kids around her age. Huddling for warmth. She was relocated after two months to a new family, only to discover shortly after that the house had burnt down. She wonders if the fire had started in the basement, if the boiler had caught fire, if there were any kids down there. If anybody had died. She doesn't like to think about it.

She's been busy cleaning the house, too. Mr. J doesn't clean, after all, and someone has to. She finds leftover cleaning supplies from the previous occupant in a box beneath the kitchen sink. She wipes down the inside of the oven and the top of the stove, cleans out the interiors of the fridge, spritzes all the counters with multi-purpose cleaning spray. Mops the floors. She Windexes the mirror in the bathroom and cleans the toilet, and then on hands and knees vigorously scrubs the bathtub. It's a little less brown by the time she's done, and she's proud of her work, even if Mr. J won't notice.

She sighs when she's done, shrugging out of the yellow rubber gloves she had found. She wipes the sweat off her forehead with the back of her forearm, still crouched in front of the bathtub. When she goes to stand, she nearly jumps out of her skin, startled by the presence in front of her. She gasps and takes a step back, tripping over the lip of the bathtub and falling backwards into it, landing flat on her ass with her legs dangling over the side.

He laughs at her.

"Mr. J," she breathes. Her heart slams furiously against her ribcage. He's dressed in full attire. His greasepaint looks old, and it bleeds over his face, settling into all the crevices of his skin. "You scared me."

"_Sorry_, sweet pea." He's still smiling, his tongue prodding at the inside of his cheek, like he's amused at having scared the shit out of her. But his eyes are unusually dark, staring at her with an intensity that is unwarranted given the situation. He almost looks lost for a moment, like he's remembering something.

She chuckles a little, mostly to displace the strange tension. "How long have you been standing there?"

"Long enough."

She goes to pull herself out of the bathtub, but he reaches forward instead, grabbing her with both hands, fisting the straps of her overalls and pulling her to her feet. She flushes when she's standing in front of him. His bare knuckles graze her t-shirt.

"I—I cleaned the house," she tells him, mostly just for something to say. Maybe a little bit for his approval, too.

"Did you?"

She nods, biting down on her lip. "It took me all day."

"Aren't you a _good_ girl," he coos, and she flushes, pleased with herself, tinged with warmth from his praise. He still hasn't let go yet, and she watches the way his eyes flutter down, to her parted mouth.

She breathes out, a little nervous, and extracts herself from his hold, already missing the contact.

"I didn't think you'd be home so early," she says. She has to flatten herself against the wall to squeeze past him, and he makes no effort to give her more room. She thinks she catches a momentary flick of annoyance in the way his jaw goes taut, the way his mouth works for a second, but then he's following her out of the bathroom, and she is walking backwards, feeling anxious, for some reason, like she shouldn't put her back to him. "It's Christmas Eve," she says by way of explanation.

Mr. J hums.

"Batman didn't want to come out and _play_," he tells her. He seems annoyed by this, and a million questions about it lay suspended on her tongue, but then she turns, just slight, just enough for something bright to catch in her peripheral. She pauses, turning to look at the item in question, a small box on the counter, wrapped in candy cane wrapping paper.

"Is that—is that for me?" She turns to look at him, almost not wanting to, half afraid that if she looks away for even a second the box will be gone. Mr. J nods, once, and her mouth parts in awe. "I've never… no one's ever…." She trails off, her brows knitted together. He knows what she's trying to say.

She goes to the counter, picks up the item, a small, rectangular box. The wrapping paper job is shit, and she kind of smiles at that, because he must have done it himself.

"This is really for me?" she asks again, holding it to her chest, cradled tightly in her arms, like it might suddenly grow legs and run away.

He steps closer, and out of instinct she clutches the present tighter, as if he means to take it away from her. She catches his smirk.

"Open it."

He doesn't have to tell her twice.

She tears into the wrapping paper, already smiling. The red and white paper floats to the floor at her feet as she stares in disbelief at the item in front of her.

"Are you serious?!" she squeals.

It's a cellphone.

A freaking _cellphone_. She can't imagine how much this must of cost him. She's never owned an electronic in her whole life. She had a plastic Minnie Mouse watch, once, in fifth grade, something she'd found on the playground at school and had been too selfish to place in the lost and found bin, if that counts. But this, a _cellphone_. She thinks if she says it enough times, it might begin to feel real. She never could've dreamed he would give her something like this. Is it so they can talk when he's away? Does he miss her when he's gone? Does he want to check up on her when she's at school? Know how her day is going? She flushes at the idea of him wanting to know how she's doing when they're apart, at the thought of him _thinking_ about her when they're not together, and it makes heat simmer somewhere low in her belly. This is good. This means he wants to be closer to her. That he misses her. That he wants _more_ from her.

She takes it to the countertop so she can open it there, pulling apart the box to get to the contents inside. It's nice, whatever it is. Sleek and silver. Shiny. She doesn't know the model and she doesn't care. It's a real cellphone, a fancy one, like the ones everyone has at school.

She sees her reflection staring back at her in the black screen when she looks down, the overhead lights creating a white, blurry halo above her, and she can't help the sudden prickle of tears at her eyes. She tugs her lower lip into her mouth.

"Thank you," she murmurs. She doesn't know why she's crying. She wipes at her tears with the back of her forearm, embarrassed that she would cry in front of him about this. It's the first time she's ever been given a gift—a _real _gift, something just for her, wrapped in pretty paper. It's hers, with purposeful intent—not just something generic and unisex, like the Secret Santa gifts they used to pass around in elementary school. Pencils and stickers. Cookies. Brand new Play-Doh.

She sniffles and tries to smile, but it just makes her eyes water even more.

Mr. J takes a step closer, and the moment he's within reach, she closes the distance between them and buries herself in his embrace, wrapping her arms around his middle. She knows she must stink of chemicals and bleach from earlier, and she worries about being pushed away, but she needs this right now. She just needs to be held.

Mr. J doesn't hug her back, but fists the back of her t-shirt with one hand instead, almost as if he intends to pull her away.

It's enough that he doesn't.

She sniffles into his jacket, feeling embarrassed but also feeling so full she fears the seams holding her heart together might burst from the extra strain. She pulls away just enough to look up at him.

"Mr. J," she says suddenly, her forehead creased in concern, "I—I didn't get anything for you." Her heart clenches at this admission. She was afraid he wouldn't want to celebrate Christmas, or that he'd be away, or too busy. Now she has no money left. Normally she sets some aside for special occasions, but she'd spent all her savings on a new pair of shoes, her other pair having grown so worn she'd resorted to using duct tape to keep the soles from falling out. She realizes now how selfish she's been, not to buy him anything.

"Hm," he says. He looks at her for a long, hard moment. His eyes are penetrating. He lifts his free hand and thumbs at her chin, wiping away a stray tear. Then his eyes darken, and she feels his fingers curl possessively around her jaw. "I know what you can give me."

Taylor realizes suddenly that the hand at her back isn't to pull her away—it's to keep _her _from pulling away from _him_. She unconsciously wets her lips, hardly dares to breathe as she waits for him to speak. Her heartbeat throbs in her ears. He can't mean what she thinks he means… can he?

"What is it?" she whispers.

He leans down and forward, just slight, and Taylor's heart seizes somewhere along the column of her throat, and she can't breathe, and she feels so small, trapped in the cage of his hungry gaze. She desperately searches his eyes for meaning as he lifts her chin, but her brain feels as though it's skidded to a halt. She sucks in a shuddering breath, and he angles his head some, and his red mouth hovers _right there_—

It's everything she's ever wanted. And she's _terrified_.

Her eyes flit down to his waiting mouth, and she almost thinks of their _other _first kiss—the one where he pried open her mouth and stuck his fingers inside to hold it open, how violating it felt to have his tongue lapping over her teeth and the roof of her mouth like that, like a dog trying to get to the treat hidden inside a hard bone. But also, how _good_ it felt to be devoured, how wet and warm his tongue was, how urgently he panted and licked into her open mouth, like he wanted to taste her from the inside out.

_You really will let me do anything, won't you?_

For a second, instinct screams for her to pull away, but the hand fisting the back of her t-shirt prevents her from moving, and her legs feel frozen in place anyway. She thinks her knees are locked.

She swallows to urge more moisture back into her mouth, and then she presses a hand against his chest to steady herself. She summons all of her courage—a whole, trembling army of it—to lean up, bridge the small gap between them. At the last second, she falters, pressing a soft kiss against the right side of his jaw, just below his scar. Her kiss is dainty. Unhurried. Her upper lip brushes the lower portion of his scar, where the skin is a little softer than all the rest.

She pulls away, slowly—and something inside him snaps. One hand around her throat, the other around her upper arm, and then he's pushing her backwards, her lower back meeting the edge of the countertop with bruising force as he shoves her against it, pinning her there with his weight. She gasps, but is too stunned to offer resistance, her brows knitted together in panic, or shock, she's not sure which.

His hand at her throat doesn't squeeze, it's just _there_, and she takes a careful, shuddering breath.

"Mr. J," she breathes. His eyes are blown—black, glassy—and he's breathing hard through his nose, and she watches the muscle along his jaw jump and twitch beneath his skin. She searches his gaze, but can't figure out how to read the expression there. She feels embarrassed. Afraid.

He didn't like that. He didn't _want_ it. How could she have been so wrong? How could she have misinterpreted things so badly? Had she imagined him leaning towards her? Looking at her mouth? Had she constructed the whole thing out of traitorous fantasy?

He lowers his head then, and she stiffens when he buries his face in her neck. She feels the hard line of his nose bump along the side of her throat, where her pulse jumps. He chuffs like a bear against her, all heavy, hot breath, awakening a wave of goose bumps across her skin. It feels unhinged. Dangerous. This is terrain they haven't crossed before—not like this—and it's_ terrifying_. She thinks she can almost feel the way his resolve is about to snap in two. His left hand curls a little tighter around her throat, just under her jaw, forcing her head up, so she has to blink up at the ceiling, dizzy from the hot lights. She makes a small, pained noise, but doesn't try to pull away.

God, he's so angry he can't even _look_ at her.

Dread settles low in her underbelly, a suffocating weight that threatens to make her knees give out.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry—" Her words come tumbling out of her mouth in one giant, tangled knot. She arches her head up further so she can talk, exposing even more of her neck to him in the process. "I won't do it again. _Please_ don't hurt me."

Mr. J stills, and Taylor holds her breath as he slowly pulls away from her. His hand falls away from her throat, and he relinquishes his grip from her upper arm. The look he fixes her with is one that turns her blood cold. It's a look she is not unfamiliar with—it's the same way Nathan used to look at her on the rare occasion when she would challenge him, or after he was done using her, when he'd wiped his come off on her sheets or on her pajamas. Looking at her like she'd asked for it, like she'd _wanted_ it, like he was revolted by how disgusting she was. _Slut_, he'd say, shoving her down when she'd try to lift up on her elbows and look at him behind her.

Shame cocoons itself around her, hot and vice-like—just like it did back then—until she can feel nothing else, until she just wants to sink into the floor, dissolve into a puddle right there in front of him, let the linoleum soak her up. She has to look away, unable to bear the weight of his repulsion.

He surprises her when her phone comes sliding across the countertop. It bumps into her arm as it skids to a stop.

She turns to look at him, several steps away now, but his back is to her. "Go play with your phone," he tells her. His voice sounds rough, full of gravel, but he won't turn to face her, like he can't even bear to look at her. It hits her like a gut punch. She's never seen him act like this before. She watches the way his shoulders heave when he breathes out, his hands clenched into fists at his sides, and goose bumps prickle over her arms all over again. This quiet anger frightens her. The unpredictability of it. A small part of her wants to reach out and touch him, tell him again how sorry she is, try to smooth out all the crevices where his anger currently resides, but her words end up tangled on top of her tongue, and she knows she won't be able to force them out.

She picks up her phone with trembling hands. Retreats to her bedroom.

In the doorway, she pauses to look over her shoulder and into kitchen where he still stands, immobile. When he cranes his neck to look at her, too, his shoulders hunched close to his ears, some sensation slithers down her spine that she cannot identify, something unnerving and hot. She closes the door behind her with a soft click and then sinks against it, sliding all the way down to the floor.

With her knees pulled up to her chest, phone forgotten, she reaches up and gently touches two fingers to her lips. She knows that later, in bed, she'll worry that she's ruined things between them. That he won't like her anymore, or he'll avoid her, or things will have been irrevocably altered. Silence will sprout between them like weeds, a whole thick wall of them that will blot out even the sun. She knows she'll agonize over it later, replay their interaction over and over again on loop, toss and turn and lose countless hours of sleep.

That will come later. But right now? Right now, all she can think about is the heat of his skin bleeding onto her fingertips—and how she wishes she had been brave enough to kiss his mouth instead.

* * *

At school, after Christmas break has ended much too soon, everyone's buzzing over the upcoming winter formal. Everyone seems even more excited about it than usual this year. It's masquerade-themed, something they've never done before. The hallways and lockers are dotted with flyers, and then there's the big, sagging banner that hangs in the main corridor, put together by the senior class. She doesn't know why, but she kind of wants to go. She's never been to a school dance before. She's never been asked, and there was also never any money—or time—as dances always seemed to fall near the date of some other major event. Whether it was changing schools, or being shuffled from one foster home to the next, school dances had always been an object in her periphery, never a primary focus.

Now, though… now she wants to see what all the fuss is about. In lab, she hears the girls behind her whispering about their dresses, pulling up pictures on their phones to show each other while Mr. Ericson struggles to light the Bunsen burner at the front of the class.

Taylor scrolls through her phone later that night in bed, searching through countless pages of homecoming and prom dresses. Everything is so expensive, and it's hard to find something under a hundred dollars; she's never even spent fifty dollars on one item, let alone a hundred. There's no way she could afford any of these, even if she would've had the foresight to save up her allowance for several months.

She huffs in annoyance and slides her phone under the pillow, turning onto her side and pulling her covers up to her chin. There's no way she's going, now, not unless she shows up in a pair of jeans.

On Saturday, she catches the bus into downtown. Mr. J is gone somewhere, so he won't mind. He's been avoiding her anyway, and the longer she sits in the house doing nothing, the longer she spends agonizing over her mistake, thinking about how she's irrevocably ruined things between them.

She has five dollars in her back pocket, but she figures if she can just look at a few dresses, maybe she can get the whole thing out of her system and not have to think about it anymore. School dances are dumb, anyway, and no one even asked her to go. No one ever asks her.

Two days before, she had watched a boy slip a note into a locker a few rows down from her, and she bit her lip and tried not to make it obvious that she was staring while his friends slapped him on the back and grinned their approval. A desperate part of her had wished that that could have been her, that she could've been the owner of that locker. She wishes she could've been the girl who got to open up that locker later on in the day, surprise coloring her features as the folded note came spilling out, maybe with two tickets to the dance tucked inside, along with a sweet, handwritten note.

Taylor gets off the bus and enters the mall through JC Penny's. She browses in there for a while, aimless, not impressed by their small collection of dresses, and then takes the escalator to the second floor. She wonders if Logan will be at the dance, and what kind of dress she might wear—if she'd even wear a dress—or if she has a date. She pictures Logan in something kind of obnoxious and bright. Something with lots of sparkles or sequins—and she'd have her combat boots on underneath.

She imagines the two of them going together, how they might pose for a picture together at the entrance, maybe under some sparkly archway with a paper moonlit backdrop, like they do in movies.

Maybe Logan will go with her group of girlfriends—Emily and Katie and Becca all crowding into the limousine that Emily's parents had rented for them. Taylor wonders what that would be like. Who needed boys when you had a close-knit group of girlfriends you could do everything with?

She window-shops for a while, not really sure where to go or what she's looking for. She wanders into Macy's after a while, and circles around the glass perfume and makeup cases twice before finally asking for help. An older woman in glasses and a floral blouse points her in the right direction. She ambles between clothing racks that dwarf her in height, winding around a maze of tulle and sequins and lace and fabrics that are smooth, almost slippery to the touch. All the dresses are floor-length and look way too tall for her, but maybe that's the point. Would she need to buy a pair of heels, too? She's never worn heels before. Maybe once, when she snuck into the closet of one of her foster moms and tried on a couple of pairs before she got home from work. It was innocent. She was too small for them, after all, but she wobbled around in front of the floor-length mirror that hung on the back of the closet door, trying not to teeter over and land flat on her butt. There was a good two inches between her heel and the back of the shoe. She cocked her head at her reflection, confused about the way her toes were all pinched together at the front. Was it supposed to hurt like that?

She winds further into maze. Her footsteps are almost non-existent on the stained, threadbare carpet, but then she sees it: the dress that makes her stop in her tracks. It's emerald green with a square neckline and spaghetti straps, silky and smooth to the touch. It's modest but beautiful—cinched at the waist—and when Taylor reaches for it to inspect the back, her eyes widen in surprise. It's a completely open back, with several straps that crisscross and finally tie in a thin bow at the lower back. She finds one she thinks will be her size and doesn't even look at the price tag as she pulls it off the metal rack. She doesn't know if she's supposed to ask for help, but there's no attendant in the dressing room, so she curls it over her forearm and slides into the very last dressing room, closing and locking the wooden door, which leaves her calves exposed at the bottom. It smells like old sweat and Pine-Sol, and she tries not to think too hard about the dark stains on the carpet.

She hurriedly strips out of her clothes—her bra, too—nudging them into the corner with her foot to make room for the dress. She is careful as she steps into it, shimmying it up past her thighs and hips, and then finally slipping the straps over her shoulders. She tucks her chin to her chest as she reaches behind her to tighten some of the straps and to retie the thin bow that rests on her lower back. Then she look up and finally studies herself in the mirror.

It's breathtaking. She never knew she could look so good in something, that a piece of clothing could hug her the way this dress does, accentuating curves she didn't even know that she had. She turns around and has to look over her shoulder to study the back. She's never showed this much skin before. She thinks—for the very first time—that she looks like a woman, and she has to blink at herself in the mirror several times to process the reflection staring back at her.

Overcome with the need to capture the moment—fearing she'll never look like this again—she fishes her cell phone out of her backpack and turns around, snapping a picture of the back of her dress. She takes one of the front, too, just for good measure. For posterity. She looks in the mirror again, thinking that her eyes have never looked as green as they do now. She does a little excited hop, feeling happy and light as she puts her phone away and shrugs out of the dress. She's just hooked her bra back on when she kneels to look at the price tag spilling out of the fabric, and her eyes bug at _$299.99._

_You've got to be kidding me, _she thinks. Her shoulders sag of their own accord, her mood shattered instantly. She knew it was going to be expensive, but she didn't think it would be _that _expensive. There's no way she can ask Mr. J for that much money.

She pulls her clothes back on with a frown, tugs the dress back on the hanger. She reaches for her backpack, but is drawn to a pause. She thinks about how easy it would be to stuff the dress into the recesses of backpack. No one would know. People leave clothes in the dressing room all the time, so even if she didn't exit with it where the cameras could see it, that wouldn't be cause for concern, right?

She gets up, shuffles through the fabric of the dress, blindly searching for a security tag, one of those bulky clips that explode with ink if you try to pry them off, but there is none. That seems strange. Almost too easy.

She heaves a sigh as she takes the dress and puts it back on the rack where it belongs. There's no way she could pull of stealing, she'd be a nervous wreck the whole day, even after she returned home. Plus, she knows she'd carry her guilt around with her like a second skin, weighing her down until she crumpled under the new weight and eventually confessed.

In the food court, she sits at a table near the water fountain, the milk-white sky pouring in from the skylight. She doesn't really like winter. She feels like she hasn't seen the sun in months, and it only serves to sour her mood even more. She sulks as she munches on the chocolate chip cookie she'd got from Mrs. Fields. It's loaded with white, creamy icing and rainbow sprinkles. She licks the icing off her fingers when she's done. She'd wanted a lemonade, too, something sour and sweet to wash all the icing down, but she didn't have enough money.

At the bus stop, she only has to wait for a couple of minutes before it arrives. It'll be dark soon, and it looks like it's going to rain, too. When she scans her bus pass, however, it's promptly declined. Taylor scans it again and frowns. There are people lining up behind her. She has no money to buy another pass—she'd just spent the last of it on the cookie. She looks up at the driver in confusion. He shrugs.

"Sorry, kid," he says, not sounding sorry at all.

"I had two more rides left, this is wrong," she explains. People shoulder past her in the tight entrance, their own passes cheerily expressing a _ding!_ as they slide through the scanner and are accepted.

The bus driver looks at her blankly, like she's trying to pull a free ride out of him, despite the obvious panic creasing her features. He shrugs, _nothing I can do_, and her face heats up in embarrassment when she looks into the back of the bus where everyone is already seated, staring at her. She bites her lip and shuffles off the bus, panicked and scared. She's too far from home to walk, it'd take hours. And it's getting dark.

She paces at the bus stop as she watches it pull away. There'll be another one in fifteen minutes, but she has no more money left, not even for a one-way ticket. She sits down on the bench and tries to swallow down her panic when she suddenly remembers her cell phone.

Relief floods through her as she pulls it out of her backpack. She types in her passcode and then stares at the home screen, thinks suddenly about how she's never contacted Mr. J this way before. Should she call? Text? Will he even answer? Will he be angry?

She settles on sending him a text message—much safer that way, just in case he's in the middle of something. She won't be interrupting.

> _6:47_
> 
> _r u there?_
> 
> _bus pass expired_
> 
> _i have no money_

She bounces her knee impatiently as she waits for his response. Thankfully, she doesn't have to wait long.

> _6:49_
> 
> _Where are you?_

She quickly types back. Relieved.

> _6:49_
> 
> _corner of 7 and 10_
> 
> _i'm at the mall_

Her phone buzzes with his reply.

> _6:51_
> 
> _Don't move._

She doesn't, at least not until he texts her back forty-five minutes later and tells her to walk three blocks down the street, cut left at the bar.

It's dark by then, and the rain's held off—at least it had, up until she makes it the first block and then the sky opens up and unleashes a torrent at all once. She runs the rest of the way, turns left at the bar and crosses the street, as instructed. She's in the back parking lot of some kind of packaging store. She notices a black car parked there with the headlights on, yellow and blurry through the onslaught of rain. She pushes the wet hair out of her face and wonders if that's him, only to get her answer when she hears the click of the doors unlocking. She runs to the passenger side, pulling open the door and sinking inside, shoving her backpack near her feet. The lights don't cut on when the door opens, but she doesn't need them to know that she's completely soaked. She closes the door and shivers. The car is cold, not at all warm like she had hoped. Her teeth clatter as she folds her arms to her chest, hugging herself.

"I'm sorry—" she blurts immediately. She turns to Mr. J.

Except, it's not Mr. J.

She jolts at the familiar face, dread washing over her hard and fast, like the sudden slap of an icy wave. She immediately spins around to open the door, only to have it lock before she can wrench it open. Her heart constricts somewhere in her throat.

"Hey, hey, calm down, it's alright," he says.

_Ressling_.

"I don't—don't wanna be in the car with you," she huffs. She's hyperventilating. She's still trying at the door, but it's too dark, and she can't see anything. Can't get it to unlock. Why won't it unlock? Is it childproof or something? How—

She jumps at his hand on her shoulder. "Hey—hey," he says again, this time more gently, and she sucks in a shuddering breath, willing herself to calm down, to stop shaking. "I'm not going to hurt you. The Joker—_Mr. J_—" he hedges, the name falling awkwardly off his tongue, as if he's saying it for the first time, "—he wants me to take you home. That's all I'm doing. I promise."

She flinches away from his hand, trying to put as much distance between the two of them as physically possible. She's still shivering. Hard. She can hear her teeth clicking together in the silence, no longer just from the cold. Rain slaps against the windshield, interrupted only by the mechanical hum of the wipers.

"Just take me home," she grits out, but it's without menace; she hates the terrified warble in her voice.

"Okay," he says. "Okay." He takes the car out of park and sets it into reverse, rests his hand against the back of her headrest as he backs them out of the parking lot.

She scoots herself to the edge of her seat as much as possible, flattening herself up against the door, like putting that marginal amount of distance between the two of them will help soothe her anxiety—anxiety that pulses inside her like an electric current. She digs her fingers into her thighs, rucking up her wet jeans, scratching her nails through the soaked fabric until she worries she'll wear a hole through them.

She doesn't like him. He lied to her. He led her to the wolves, knowing she was about to get eaten alive. He knew. He _knew_.

_Just like Mr. J knew, _her brain helpfully supplies.

But that doesn't matter now. That was what Mr. J had wanted, after all. It was _part of the plan_. Somehow that made it all okay.

And she can't be mad at Mr. J—she can't—and her misplaced anger has to go somewhere, otherwise it'll coil up inside her until it's all bloated and tight, until it can't fit inside her anymore, and it has nowhere else to go but to come bursting out, unable to be contained.

The ride is silent. The radio's off. Taylor manages to get her breathing under control and she fixes her gaze out the window, the passing blur of the city—darkened and rain-slicked streets, drooping telephone wires and blinking florescent signs in shop windows—but she keeps Ressling in her peripheral just in case. She doesn't know why. She doesn't think he'd try to hurt her, but she doesn't trust him. She'd learned that the hard way.

It's stopped raining by the time they arrive. He pulls the car to a stop along the curb. He lets it stall for a moment, but then he shuts it off. She wonders if Mr. J asked him not to pull into the driveway or something. She doesn't care. She just wants _out_.

The orange light from a nearby streetlamp slices into the car from one of the back windows. It illuminates a patch of his jaw. A five o'clock shadow. When he shifts to face her, the sherbet light whispers along the edges of a weird, swirling tattoo on his neck, like one of those black and white optical illusions that make it look like the whorls are moving when they're not. Like the ones they use for hypnosis. She doesn't remember that being there before.

She quickly looks away. He hasn't unlocked the door yet.

The car feels pregnant, clogged with silence. She waits, perched on the edge of her seat, forcing her hands to be still even though she wants nothing more than to dig her nails into her jeans and scratch, scratch, scratch.

"Look," he says, breaking through the silence at last, "not that it means much, but I'm sorry about—what happened."

She process his words, lets his apology teeter around in her head, where it bounces back and forth aimlessly, like it doesn't know where to go. She can do nothing with an apology.

She wets her lips. Doesn't look at him. "You're right—it doesn't mean much."

"I didn't know—"

"—that I was going to get gang raped until I passed out?"

She looks at him. He stares at her. A part of her can't believe she just said that—verbalized the horror of what she went through out loud—but she wants it to sting. She wants him to know exactly what monstrosities he was complicit in facilitating. Her jaw aches from how hard she's clenching it. Her nostrils flare, the sounds of her labored breathing filling up the silence.

"Listen," he says, shifting towards her. This time his brow is creased with concern that feels genuine—but she won't fall for it. "You have no _idea _what he's—"

"Let me out," she demands.

"Taylor…."

"_Don't_ say my name. You don't know me." She only says it because she's afraid he _does_ know her—perhaps even more intimately than she knows herself. He's the only one who knows about her relationship with Mr. J, and she worries suddenly about the transparency of her want. Her need. Is it pathetic? Is it terrible? Does he think she's a stupid little kid with a school-girl crush? Does he think she's disgusting for loving a monster? "Let me _out_."

Ressling sighs, but does what she asks. As soon as the lock clicks, she bursts out in a flurry, hefting her backpack up with her. The passenger door swings on its hinges. She doesn't bother to close it. She doesn't look back.

The house is dark when she gets inside. She locks the door behind her, and the click of the deadbolt is satisfying in the darkness. Grounding. She waits in the shadowed safety that the fridge provides until the yellow headlights flood through the curtains in the TV room and then disappear.

She sighs in relief when he's gone, and her whole body seems to uncoil after that. She hadn't realized how taut she'd been the whole car ride. She feels as though her knees might buckle.

In the bathroom, she peels off her wet clothes and then shivers underneath the spray of hot water. It takes a while to warm back up, and she gets out only when her skin is pink and hot to the touch. She slips clean underwear up her thighs, and tugs her favorite article of clothing over her head—an oversized grey hoodie she got from Goodwill that says 'MSU' on the front in green block lettering. She slips on a pair of socks and then pads into the kitchen.

It's late, but she's too wound up to sleep. She wonders what Mr. J was doing that he was too busy to come pick her up—he could've texted her to let her know he wasn't coming, or that he was sending someone in his place.

She wonders if he knows how much she hates Ressling, wonders why Ressling is the only person who works for Mr. J that she's ever seen. Surely there are others, right? She's never really thought about it until now, but there has to be more. Maybe Mr. J just trusts Ressling more than anyone else?

She flicks on the light beneath the stove, hoping that getting something to eat will quell her festering nausea.

Her eyes scan the interior of the fridge; there aren't a lot of options to choose from. She takes two eggs from the carton and sets them to boil in some water on the stove.

When they're finished and the eggs have cooled, she takes one and rolls it between the flat of her palm and the hard counter until it caves under her weight, the shell splintering into a web of tiny cracks. She holds her breath then for the moment of truth, worried that, when the shell crumbles beneath the soft pressure of the flat of her palm, a burst of runny yellow and white yolk will slide out.

She's always been a little scared to crack eggs. One time she watched her foster mother—Karen, maybe—open a cardboard carton of eggs and, with a hum of surprise, her eyebrows drawing up into her hairline, noted a gray tuft of feathers poking out from one of the eggs nestled in its little designated seat. Taylor watched her pick up the egg and raise it to the light streaming in from the kitchen window, turning it this way and that between her fingers—only to toss the egg into the trash beneath the sink a moment later.

Taylor lurched from the table as if pulled by a leash. Her emesis was yellow and pulpy. Violent. It burned its way up her throat, leaving a caustic trail, and then clung to the gold rings inside the toilet bowl. Her mouth tasted like orange juice and acid.

It horrified her to think of some tiny little creature caught in the passage of time, not yet alive, but not yet dead, either, just in-between. The unknowable halfway stage between life and death. Did consciousness exist in such a place? Was it like Heaven and Hell—were you stuck there forever?

She eats her boiled eggs at the counter after slicing them into thirds, chewing slowly, trying to make them last. It doesn't quite quench her hunger—or her nausea—but it makes it more tolerable so that when she slips under her covers, she doesn't feel quite as anxious and pent-up as before.

She lays in bed for a long time, soaked in the soft glow of her Christmas lights, studying the elongated shadows they cast along the ceiling. When she can't sleep, she slips her phone out from beneath her pillow and pulls up the pictures she had taken in the dressing room. She looks pretty—beautiful, even—the first time she's ever thought that, and she wonders suddenly how different her life might've been if she had been born into a normal family. A mom and dad who had actually wanted her. What would she be doing right now? How different would the world look through the eyes of someone who was loved and cared for? Would she have a date for the dance? Maybe her mom would have taken her shopping for a dress, maybe she would have said, "Pick out whatever you want, honey. You deserve it."

She falls asleep thinking about baby birds born without wings; nowhere to go, no way to fly, unwanted by everyone, even their mothers.

Born on accident.

She thinks she can relate.

* * *

She's jolted awake early the next morning. She's not sure if the sound of the gunshot was real or if she'd dreamt it. She tries settling back down to sleep, but no matter how hard she tries, it won't come. She sits up in bed. Rubs the sleep out of her eyes. It's still dark out.

Mr. J usually isn't home on Sundays—then again, lately he hasn't been home much at all—and something uncomfortable settles in her belly when she realizes how much she misses him. She wonders when he'll be home again, when she'll get to see him for longer than five minutes at a time. She tries not to think that he might be avoiding her, but she knows that he is. Maybe she should apologize again for kissing him. She's replayed the memory in her head hundreds of times now, and she still can't figure out where it all went wrong. _I know what you can give me. _Why hadn't he just said? What else could he have wanted? Had she imagined that he'd leaned in closer? Had she wanted it _that _badly that she had hallucinated the whole thing?

She throws off her covers and slips out of bed. Opens her door and pads out into the hallway.

Mr. J stops her dead in her tracks on the way to the bathroom. She has to do a double take when she sees him, lounging there on the couch, his shirt off, legs crossed at the ankles on top of the coffee table. Her heart does a little somersault in her chest and she blinks at him in surprise. She's never seen Mr. J with his shirt off. Even more shocking, as she pads closer, she realizes he's smoking. He's never smoked before—at least not in front of her. When did this start?

It's quiet. Cold. The TV's on, the news droning faintly in the background, but he's not watching.

Her brows furrow as she approaches, almost cautious, like she's stumbled upon something she isn't supposed to see. She rounds the couch and stares at him. His head rests on the back of the couch, cigarette held between his lips. Eyes closed. Smoke curls lazily into the air. Daylight is just starting to slither through the slats in the blinds, different shades of blue and grey, like an old bruise. The room slants with a cold, bluish pallor. She lets her eyes drift down, sliding over his large clavicles, his broad chest, the slightly concave plane of his belly, the wiry patch of hair that trails from his navel all the way down into his slacks. She swallows.

"If you take a picture it'll last longer," he says. He cracks open one eye to look at her, and she flushes.

Her laughter comes out short, in a nervous puff of air. Her cheeks burn hot. "I didn't know you smoked."

"I_ don't_."

He sits up suddenly, plants his feet on the floor. The cigarette dangles between his index and middle finger. She swallows and tries not to stare at the ripple of muscle in his chest when he moves. His powerful shoulders. Skin littered with scar tissue. Day-old bruises. Cuts that never had time to heal. Did Batman do that to him? She's so busying ogling him she misses the way his eyes rake over her bare legs, where her hoodie ends mid-thigh.

Their eyes lock at the same time. She suddenly feels afraid that this will end before it even begins. He'll mumble something about having to go, and she'll be left alone in the house all day again.

"I missed you," she blurts, regretting the words almost as soon as they tumble out of her mouth. It sounds desperate. Too honest.

Mr. J's eyes glimmer. His mouth curls into a slow smile, one that bares his teeth. "Me too, princess." He takes a drag from his cigarette, and Taylor watches him do it, hypnotized. "Come here," he gestures, patting coffee table in front of him. "Sit."

Relief floods through her. If he missed her then he's not angry with her. Maybe he's just been really busy. That's all.

She pads closer, easing herself down onto the coffee table. She folds her hands in her lap, conscious of all her bare skin, and it's a moot point, trying to pull her hoodie farther down her thighs, so she doesn't. He scoots back into the couch, settling an arm across the back of it. Crosses his ankle on top of his knee.

He seems to study her for a moment, taking a slow drag before releasing it all in a long exhale of breath. There are dark circles under his eyes, purpled half-moons, and she wonders if he slept at all last night. What time he got home. He cocks his head at her.

"Something on your mind?" he asks innocently.

She tucks her hands between her thighs and then squeezes them together, trapping her hands there. Her teeth sink into her bottom lip as she considers his question. _Everything's_ on her mind. She wants to ask him if he's been avoiding her. If he's mad at her. Tell him about Ressling, and how much she doesn't like him. Ask him why he's been away so much, ask him where those bruises came from, and do they hurt? Tell him about her green dress and the dance, but what if he says no? Tell him about her strange dream from the other night, how scared she is of the future—their future—which suddenly feels more intangible and impossible than ever before. How much longer can things go on like this? There is an invisible string that exists between them, tethering the two of them together—constantly pulsing, vibrating with energy—and she feels it starting to fray.

She opens her mouth to speak—say something, she's not sure what—but he scoots forward suddenly to the edge of the couch, so her thighs are trapped inside his own. His eyes glitter with something dangerous. Something hot that should not be touched.

"Wanna try?"

Taylor blinks up at him, frowning, and then her gaze flits to where the cigarette dangles precariously from the corner of his mouth.

"I've never…" she trails off. He knows. She doesn't have to tell him.

His gaze is penetrating, too hot, even in the damp, cool blue light of dawn. A rogue sliver of sunlight cuts through a blanket of clouds, slices a path through the half-opened blinds where a warm stripe of yellow lays itself down to rest across the valley of her inner thighs.

She swallows. Nods.

His eyes are heavy—loaded—as he removes the cigarette from his mouth and passes it to her. She shivers a little, holds it like it might burn her, just the tip, pinning it between her pointer finger and thumb. It's a little wet when she fits it between her lips. She inhales, slowly, her mouth filling with sour, pungent smoke. Mr. J watches her the whole time. She coughs when she breathes out. _Gross_. It reminds her of the first time she tried beer at that one party she never should have gone to, Ressling finding her on the curb after the fact, drugged up and shivering. She frowns at the memory. Seems like Ressling is always coming to her rescue when she needs something—except for the one time he didn't. Does he follow her when she's not with Mr. J? Or is it just coincidence that he seems to be everywhere that she is?

The question coats her tongue in a sour film, but when she opens her mouth to speak, something catches her attention on the TV behind her, a female reporter breaking through the monotony of whatever was on before, and Taylor's drawn to a pause, turning her head some so she can hear better.

"—reports of what is currently thought to be a homicide in Southhampton, where remains of a twenty-seven year-old woman were found around four fifteen this morning. The victim—Ashley Cantor—was found in her Bellview apartment when—"

She does turn around all the way then, something familiar about that name sparking a frisson of fear in her. She sees a brief flash of blonde hair, a familiar smile, before the TV cuts off.

She looks up to where Mr. J stands next to the TV—he _unplugged _it. Pulled the cord out of the wall. The screen is fizzy and black where the picture used to be. She gapes at him.

"Why did you do that?" She knows her voice is laced with panic. "I—I think I know her."

"I don't think that you do." He drops the plug. He says it in a way that conveys finality. Their conversation is over. But she scrambles up anyway, and it feels like a standoff, the two of them both standing there, separated only by the coffee table.

She hates when he does this—negates her experiences, makes her question things about her own reality that she knows to be true. The way he plants seeds of doubt, seeds that will eventually sprout into a field of tangled weeds so thick she won't be able to tell up from down. She _knows _she's seen that woman before, she knows it, she just can't pinpoint exactly where, or when. Why doesn't he want her to see? What's the big deal?

"Does Ressling follow me?" she blurts. If they're going to get into a fight, she might as well get it all out. "Do you make him do that?"

Mr. J cocks his head at her sudden outburst, and it makes the hairs on her arms stand on end, the way his eyes narrow, like she better watch herself. It takes him a moment to respond, like he's purposely drawing out his reply to make her even more anxious.

"What, uh… what makes you ask a question like tha_t_?"

Some of her earlier bravado flounders. "He's just… everywhere." She doesn't like having to explain herself. She folds her arms high and tight across her chest, the excess fabric from her hoodie bunching up around her. "I don't like him."

Something dark flickers in his eyes. "Did he _do_ something?"

If Ressling had been in the room with them, she thinks Mr. J would've strangled him with his bare hands by now.

"No!" she says hastily.

"Did he touch you?"

She thinks about his hand on her shoulder in the car. "…No."

She realizes suddenly that she has the power to sign Ressling's death warrant, if she wanted. All she has to do is say that he touched her, and Mr. J would—well, he'd do whatever he'd do to ensure that it didn't happen again.

It makes her shiver, this newfound discovery. She could ruin his whole life with just a few words. She wouldn't—at least, she doesn't think she would—but she could. It'd be easy.

That kind of power should be frightening—sickening, if she's honest—but she's lit up with a weird thrill from it instead. She likes knowing Mr. J would go to these lengths to defend her. To protect her. Goose bumps prickle over her legs. What else would he do for her?

She looks up when he steps away, striding past her, and she turns to watch him go, her eyes desperately soaking up the rarity of all his naked skin. The clench of muscle between his sharp shoulder blades. The dip of his lower back. She's overcome with the need to reach out, run her fingers down his spine.

She draws herself out of her reverie long enough to blurt out another question, something that effectively stops him in his tracks.

"What would you do about it," she says, "—I mean… I mean, if he did touch me? What would you do?"

She has to know. She has to know the extent of her influence. The lengths Mr. J would go to for her. Is she really as powerful as she thinks?

"I'd kill him," he says, the words slamming into her like a gut punch. He cranes his neck to look at her from over his shoulder. "But you already knew that."

* * *

Winter formal is in two days. It's all she can think about.

She lies in bed at night and Googles more photos—green dresses, like the one she tried on in Macy's—and looks for cheap alternatives, but it doesn't really matter either way. She has no money.

Which leaves only one solution.

She corners Mr. J in the kitchen the next morning before school. He seems distracted this morning. Maybe annoyed.

"Um… Mr. J?"

"What?" he snaps. He doesn't look at her. He's disemboweling some kind of walkie-talkie device on the countertop, hunched over it, colorful wires spilling out of the confines of its black casing, tiny little screws and a variety of different screwdrivers strewn across the counter. Rolls of black electrical tape, and other tools she couldn't name.

She shifts the weight of her backpack to her other shoulder. "It's just—there's this dance at school," she gets out in a rush of air, before she can overthink it, "and I really want to go. Everyone is going to be there. But I don't have a dress, and they're a lot of money, and I know you just got me the cell phone and I'm really grateful, and I don't want you to think that I'm—that I'm greedy, but I really, really want to go and I promise I'll never ask you for anything ever again—at least not for a really long time, okay?" She stops so take a breath, afraid that she's said too much.

It's a moment before he responds. She watches his fingers still over the frayed end of a red wire.

"Are you asking me for money… or permission?"

"Both?"

She watches him mull over her request. He finally looks over the counter at her. "Do I look like a _bank_ to you?"

"No!" she shakes her head. "No," she says again, softer this time.

He rolls his eyes. "Money doesn't grow on _trees_, you know."

She nods, nervous now. "I'm know. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked." She fumbles with her backpack, hitching it over her other shoulder so it hangs off of both. She is already halfway out the door when his voice calls out to her.

"How much?"

Her breath catches in her chest. The dress is three-hundred, but she'll also need a new pair of shoes, and maybe some makeup. She'll also have to buy a mask, since it's a masquerade theme….

"Four hundred?" she ventures. It feels ridiculous to ask him for that much money. She knows it's a lot. It sounds absurd even to her own ears. She's never owned that much money in her life. He'll definitely say—

"Fine."

"Really?!" she squeals. She can hardly believe it. She bites her lip, does a little up-and-down bounce by the door before running to him and embracing him from behind, her mitten-covered hands sliding over his waist. She lays her head down on his back and sighs happily.

"Thank you, Mr. J! I promise I'll make it up to you." She squeezes him one more time for good measure, and then she is backing towards the doorway. She tosses her scarf over her shoulder. "I'll get us a pizza for tonight, okay? With the anchovies you like," she promises. "Bye!"

The door closes behind her, and the Joker waits a moment before putting down the detonator. Goes to the window. He watches her skip down the sidewalk until she disappears from sight. He grins.

* * *

Friday.

Taylor can barely sit still through any of her classes. She watches the clock obsessively, which only makes time crawl even slower, but she can't help it. She's actually going to her very first school dance. _Tonight_.

It snows sometime during fifth period, and she spends most of the class staring out the window, watching it fall. They have a substitute anyway, which means they're watching Ben-Hur on the dusty overhead projector. Someone behind her snores loudly, and a few of her classmates snicker. Time skulks slowly on. She bounces her knee under her desk and watches the snow pile up. Tonight can't come fast enough.

As soon as the final bell rings, she shoots up out of her seat and heads to her locker on the second floor. Everyone is shuffling downstairs after collecting their books from their own lockers, so she knows she'll have plenty of privacy in the girls' bathroom next to Mrs. Gonzalez's classroom.

She carefully unfolds her dress from her locker, still in its protective plastic coating, and takes out the shopping bag with her new shoes and the makeup she bought. It's probably too early to get ready, still several hours before the dance, but she'll burst if she doesn't do something, and she wants to make sure she has plenty of time to get ready.

Once she's sure everybody's gone and she won't be interrupted, she sets up her supplies at the last sink station and washes her hands. She wants to try the makeup first. She's never worn mascara, or blush, or eyeshadow, and she's a little nervous to try them on all at once, but the woman at the Macy's counter gave her a lot of helpful tips. She definitely wants to try the winged eyeliner thing.

She's pleased with herself by the time she finishes her makeup, takes a little step back to really look at herself in the mirror, thinking how much older she looks. It almost feels like there's a stranger staring back at her in the mirror, some other girl, but she kind of likes it. She focuses on her hair next, nothing too complicated, just a woven crown braid around her head. She lets the rest of her hair fall down her back, taking it out of the two pigtail braids she had put it in the night before after showering, so her hair would be extra wavy.

With nothing else to do, she sits on the edge of the sink and swings her legs, digs her phone out of her backpack and plays a game she downloaded a few days ago. It kills some time. She wonders what Mr. J is doing right now and thinks about sending him a text message, but is afraid to bother him if he's busy.

She puts her phone away after a while. It's dusk, now, the snow still coming down hard. People will start arriving soon. She wonders if the dance committee is downstairs decorating and getting everything ready. She props her forearms on the cold windowsill—goose bumps sprouting over her arms at the sensation—and stares for a long time, watching the snow settle down over the bleachers lining the football field, the bright yellow goalposts. There's no wind. It's quiet. Peaceful.

She loses track of time doing that. It's almost six thirty by the time she pulls herself away to finish getting ready. She takes off her clothes in the handicapped stall, stuffs them in her backpack. Carefully unfolds her dress and slips it on. The material is cold. Slinky. She slides on her heels next, which the sales associate at Macy's helped her pick out. She'd called them "kitten heels", said they'd be easier for Taylor to walk in. They're black, open-toed, lots of overlapping straps and a thin buckle at the ankle. She'll never wear them again, probably, and the dress is so long you can't really see them, but that was the point with stuff like this, wasn't it?

For the final touch, she slips on her eye mask. It's delicate, made of thin, black metal that curves and curls in an intricate pattern and then arches up at the outer corners, like cat eyes. The edges are dotted with tiny silver jewels. She'd found it at the pawn shop for like, two dollars. Lucky find. She secures it in place by tying the black ribbon in the back.

Finally, she steps back from the mirror, and her mouth parts at the girl staring back at her. She hardly recognizes herself. She can't help but blink at her reflection, feeling dazed. Awed. She thought she'd feel like a little kid playing dress-up. She didn't think she'd feel… beautiful. She turns so her back is to the mirror, biting her lip as she looks over her shoulder, admiring all the straps crisscrossed over her back.

In the hallway, there's a peal of girlish laughter, and she hurries to retrieve her backpack from the empty stall and pack up all her things.

It's easy enough to stuff her backpack in her locker. And then she's teetering down the steps, gripping the railing with sweaty, slick palms as she heads to gymnasium.

She tries not to let her nerves get the best of her. She's never felt so exposed before, never worn something that showed so much skin. But it's easy to get lost in all the noise, forget about herself and her crippling hyperawareness, for once. It's busy downstairs, the sound of voices growing louder as she approaches. Music thumps from inside the gym. She tries not to ogle everyone's dresses and masks—some of the masks have feathers and jewels, others cover their whole face. Some are quite scary looking, if she's honest, but she's giddy all the same. She feels like she's stepped into another time. Another landscape. The pulsing beat of music and the crowd of bodies, the overlapping chatter, beckons her closer. There's a line to get into the gym, and she stands behind a girl in a sparkly, raspberry-colored dress. It's floor-length and strapless, with a thigh-high split. Her eye mask is purple and equally as sparkly. Her date loops a long, skinny arm around her waist, casual, and she leans into his embrace, smiling up at him with a big, cheesy grin. He grins back and bends down to rub their noses together. Taylor bites her lip and looks away. It would've been nice to have a date. Someone to talk to. Maybe someone to hold her hand. To dance with.

She is about to fold her arms across her chest when she stops halfway, feels someone tap on her shoulder. She turns to face the group of girls who had lined up behind her a few minutes ago. The one who had touched her looks at her with her eyebrows raised. Taylor can't tell if she's impressed or annoyed.

"Girl, that dress is insane."

"Oh—thank you," she flushes. She thinks that's a good thing. Right?

"Where did you get it?"

"Macy's?" She doesn't know why she says it like a question. Her cheeks turn even redder.

The girl makes a face as if to say, "_huh_", but doesn't say anything else. She goes back to her girlfriends to pose for a group picture.

Taylor turns back around as the line starts moving again. The music gets louder the closer she gets, and after what feels like an eternity, she finally steps through the propped open double doors of the gym. Her jaw slackens as she takes in the room. A waterfall of golden lights cascades from the ceiling, lining the walls, and hundreds of icicle lights drip from the rafters, joined by dangling paper snowflakes. Shifting beams of white and blue spotlights glaze over the maple syrup hardwood. It's pretty—breathtaking, even. She's never seen anything like it.

Next to the door on her right, there's a makeshift winter forest, a white carpet lined with fake snow, and little white plastic trees with golden lights woven through the branches, all staged against a winter landscape, a snow-dipped forest at midnight, lit by a crescent moon.

Someone asks for her ticket, and she has to blink away her shock.

"Want your picture taken?" the guy asks, nodding to the little forest. She watches a couple walk down the white, snowy carpet and then stand in front of the backdrop, posing beneath a white arbor decked out in more golden lights. She'd feel dumb doing that without a date, posing all by herself. She vigorously shakes her head and slips further into the gym.

There's some pop song playing that she isn't familiar with. Nobody is dancing yet, but the gymnasium gradually fills up as more people crowd in. She wanders over to the plastic table shoved up against one of the far walls, gets herself a cup of sherbet punch and then stands off to the side, cup clutched in both hands as she studies the room, searching for a familiar face, maybe Logan or her friends.

She stares at everyone's dresses and masks. Some guy comes dressed in a suit and a Scream mask, and his friends are all bent over at the waist in laughter as one of the chaperones fusses at him and makes him take it off.

After a while, the lights start to grow dim, people beginning to congregate onto the dance floor, and the music grows louder. She looks around a little helplessly, knowing she's out of her element. She can't help but feel like she's surrounded by total strangers; the only person she's seen so far that she recognizes is Hannah Elvine from her third period chemistry.

She gets a second cup of punch and goes back to where she was standing, shifts her weight to the other foot and tries not to feel so defeated. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. She thought she'd enjoy all the decorations and getting dressed up and seeing everyone dance and have fun—but being alone in a crowded room only serves to remind her of just how alienated and lonely she really is. She doesn't know what she expected from all this. Did she really think getting dressed up would make her suddenly likable—desirable? That people would want to approach her, befriend her?

She throws away her cup and hopes she doesn't look as awkward and dejected as she feels. Maybe she should just leave?

She doesn't know when she senses it—the sudden, spine-prickling sensation that she's being watched—but the feeling crawls over her slowly, and then all at once, until it's all she can think about. Paranoia slithers down her spine, ice cold, and she shivers. Her gaze is panicked as it sweeps over the expanse of the gymnasium. She doesn't know who or what she's looking for, only that something's not right. Something doesn't _feel_ right.

Her skin prickles despite the heat of the room. She bumps into someone's side and mumbles an apology as she stumbles backwards.

Suddenly she's on the dance floor, being jostled in the crowd of moving bodies. The song changes at that moment, switching to something electronic with a heavy, throbbing beat, something that makes the bass thunder inside her ears and lower belly. The spotlights are tinged yellow now, pulsing in time with the music. Everything glitters in the darkness, the room bathed in a blur of black and gold.

Her eyes dart desperately around the room. She feels both too hot and too cold, goose bumps lit up all over her arms. She's still being watched. She can feel it, the hungry weight of someone else's eyes tracking her every movement.

She cranes her neck both ways, looking over each shoulder, but it's hard to see in the velvety darkness, the warm crowd of pulsing bodies moving in time with the music around her, surrounding her on all sides. She meets someone's gaze for a fleeting moment, dark eyes hidden behind a glimmering peacock mask. Someone else brushes up against her, and she flinches away, stumbling backwards. Her back collides into something solid. She gasps, but doesn't have time to turn around before there are hands brazenly settling on her hips from behind, big and warm, grounding her. She feels lips at the shell of her ear.

"Where's your date, princess?"

_It can't be_—

She does pull away then, spinning around to face him. His mask startles her, all black and with curved horns protruding from the sides, like the horns of a bull. The mask covers almost the entirety of his face, even his scars. The only part of his face visible is his mouth and chin. She instinctively takes a step back, but a gloved hand reaches out and gently pulls her back.

"Where are you going?" he says. "You have somewhere more important to be?"

He's lit up for a split second in a pulse of white strobe light, like a flash of lightning. She gapes up at him.

"What are you doing here?" she breathes.

He pulls her closer, fitting her right up against him, and the proximity makes her flush. His warmth bleeds onto her, and she swallows as he slides his arms around her, where they rest on the bare skin of her lower back. His gloves feel different. Soft and silky, not like the leather he usually wears. She feels his fingers toying with the thin straps of her dress and she digs her fingers into the lapels of his jacket, where her arms are braced against his chest. She notices for the first time that he's dressed in an all-black suit. She lets her eyes trail lower, taking all of him in. His black shirt and vest. Black gloves. His suit has coattails. He looks handsome—terrifying—like the devil, or some midnight apparition, the kind that only slips out after the lights have been turned off and you've already pulled the covers up to your chin.

"Had to see my best girl all dressed up for her big _dance_," he says.

She shakes her head at him and shoots a glance towards the edges of the dance floor, where the chaperones are congregated near the table with the snacks, talking with each other, occasionally looking over to the dance floor to scan the crowd, watching for any inappropriate behavior.

"You—you shouldn't be here." She tugs on his jacket, like he could be persuaded to let her pull him towards the exit, but he doesn't budge.

"Shouldn't I?"

"Please, _please_, you have to go. Someone could see—"

She doesn't get a chance to finish before he is spinning her around, her back to his chest, his arms tightening around her waist. He rests his chin on the crook of her neck and shoulder. His humid breath wafts near her ear.

"What if I want to stay?"

She struggles to break free of his grip. "Mr. J, you _can't_, someone could see you." They go out in public together, but never like this, never where there are so many watchful eyes. Never in a crowd this large.

He nuzzles his nose into the side of her neck, where she feels the hard, plastic bump of his mask against her skin. Then he slides his mouth along the outer shell of her ear, effectively stilling her movements.

"It's just you and me," he murmurs.

She exhales slowly, but it's lost to the pulsing bassline. She looks down at where his arms are encircled around her waist, and she bites down on her lip. _Just you and me._ She feels lit up, suddenly, feverish. She marvels at how quickly her resolve starts to splinter, how easily he tears into those spiderweb of cracks with his fingers, pulling them even farther apart. Opening her up for him. She squirms a little, pushes back against him, feeling every part of him. Have they ever been this close?

"I really wanted you to come… I wanted you to see me."

She feels him smile against her neck as he releases her, spreads his hands out over the flare of her hips instead. "I do see you," he says, very low. His right hand moves to cup her throat, where he forces her to tilt her head up and back so it rests against his chest. She wonders if he can feel her swallow against the palm of his hand. He leans down, low, to whisper in hear ear. "I _always_ see you."

Warmth blooms inside her at his words. She feels his eyes searching her face, burning hot. Hungry. She's never felt like this before. Maybe she's lulled into a state of hypnotism from the music, or the way the lights seem to pulse in time with her throbbing heartbeat. The way he is touching her. She feels like they're playing with fire. His fingertips scorch her everywhere they touch. She half expects him to leave burn marks in his wake.

She turns her head to the side so he can hear her better, feeling a little coy. Playful. "Do you like my dress?"

His warm breath puffs against her cheek. His thumb strokes up and down over her carotid. "Oh, it's_ very_ pretty. I just can't keep my _hands _off you."

She looks up at him from over her shoulder. Bites down on her lower lip."Then don't."

The song changes, something a little slower but just as loud. She feels the vibrations of the bass in her stomach. There's movement all around them, but nobody seems to pay them any attention. It's like they're the only two people in the room.

The seconds drag as she anxiously waits for his reply. He releases her neck, sliding his gloved hand over her clavicle, and then her shoulder. His fingers twine around her upper arm in a way that'll bruise. His other hand curls a little tighter over her hip.

"You should be careful what you wish for."

She looks up at him. She feels the blood rush of her heartbeat throbbing in her ears. "Maybe I don't want to be careful anymore."

"You don't know what you want," he says, this time a growl. Maybe a warning.

"Do you?" she asks.

His throat bobs. And something in his gaze changes, too, his eyes darkening, and she knows whatever spark existed prior to this has burst into a full-fledged flame now—a forest fire of devastating proportions—and there's no way to put it out. No way to take it back. There's already a scorched trail of earth left underfoot in the wake of its destruction. 

Suddenly, something on his wrist beeps—a watch she's never seen him wear before. She hears it even over the music. Both their eyes lower to look at it as a blinking flash of white peeks out from beneath the sleeve of his suit. He grins. 

"Looks like that's our cue."

Cue? 

He pulls on her upper arm, tugging her through the crowd of moving bodies, towards the exit.

"Mr. J—" she starts.

"Don't talk."

He pulls her down a dark, deserted hallway, and then he's pushing open the double doors to an emergency exit. She doesn't have time to wonder why the alarm doesn't sound, can barely hear anything over the sound of her own heartbeat throbbing in her ears as she replays remnants of their earlier conversation. Did she accidentally push things too far again?

When the doors bang close behind them, he slams down a metal bar over them, and her skin prickles. That shouldn't be there.

"What are you doing?" she whispers.

He shoots her a look that makes her blood run cold. She swallows, backs away.

He wraps his hand around the meat of her upper arm again and yanks her along with him. In the parking lot, she struggles to keep up with his long strides.

He drags her through the slush and snow to the corner edge of the parking lot, where the tree line has started to encroach onto the edges of eroded asphalt. A white van is parked beneath the overhanging of trees, and Taylor feels herself slow some.

"Mr. J…" she says, warily, "what's going on?"

He lets go of her only long enough to rip open the back doors of the van.

"Get in."

She's too scared to question him. She crawls into the back, where the seats have been gutted. It's like crawling inside the cavern of a hollowed out ribcage where the organs and all the muscle and meat have been stripped out. The floor is cold and hard. Mr. J slams the doors, submerging her in darkness.

The driver's side door opens a moment later as he gets in. There's something familiar about this, she thinks, her in the back of a van on the floor and him in the driver's seat. She doesn't know why. Maybe it's a remnant from a half-remembered dream.

The engine stutters to life. He peels out of the parking lot so fast that it knocks her on her ass. She bangs her head on the metal wall on her way down, and then her elbows hit the floor, hard, singing with pain. She gasps as she hits the floor, and Mr. J glances over his shoulder. She thinks she might've torn her dress.

"Oops," he says, giggling.

She gapes at him, stunned speechless. She hates him when he's like this—sizzling under the surface, frenetic and ready to burst with pent-up energy, gleefully reckless, like everything's so damn_ funny_.

Still, she's too scared to challenge him. His behavior is too unpredictable, too flighty. She thinks he's most likely to kill her when he gets like this—in a heartbeat, and accidentally. It's safer to keep her distance.

She doesn't know what has him so riled up, and when they get home he's still just as jittery. He finally removes his mask, and Taylor takes hers off, too. She had forgotten she was still wearing it. She watches him run a hand through his hair, ruffling it, and then turn his gaze on her. He looks drunk, his eyes only half-lidded, like he's high on something, only she doesn't know what.

She backs slowly from him. He's like an excitable dog—if she runs he'll give chase. Better to just keep still, not make any sudden movements.

"What's the matter, princess?" he asks, advancing on her.

She swallows, forces herself to stand her ground. She knows she shouldn't antagonize him when he's like this, but she's angry. And her head hurts from where she slammed it against the metal wall of the van.

"I wasn't ready to leave yet. Why did we have to go?"

"Party was getting _boring_, don't you think?"

"No, I don't think." He has her cornered in the dark hallway now. She stands with her back to her bedroom door. "And I left my cellphone in my locker so now I have to go back tomorrow and get it," she huffs, crossing her arms over her chest, full of righteous indignation.

He pouts for her, his mouth pulled into an exaggerated frown. "Mr. J is _sorry_, sweetheart." He's crowding her further back against the door, and she notices the smell of him for the first time, the stench of chemicals and sweat. Maybe smoke.

She looks up at him, and her cheeks flush with the way he's looking at her, like a man starved—hungry—like he's going to feast on her right here, throw her down and make a five-course meal out of her there on the carpet. She takes a shuddering breath, fumbles for the doorknob behind her without breaking eye contact.

"Well—" she shudders, afraid of where this will go if she doesn't stop it, "—good night, Mr. J." She finally finds the doorknob, twisting it, and turns her back to him. She's stopped halfway when he reaches out a hand and snags it in the crisscrossing straps at the back of her dress, yanking her back to him.

"Oh, and, to answer your _ques-ti-on_…" he draws the word out into three syllables, and then is leaning down, lips brushing her ear, "I do know what I want."

He holds her captive for a few beats longer, lets his words sink in as she struggles to keep her breathing under control. Her chest rises and falls in the darkness. His fingers skirt against the small of her back when he releases her, and she doesn't trust herself to speak. She doesn't look back as she steps into her bedroom, shuts the door behind her in a rush.

She pants, open-mouthed, as his words simmer inside her. She remains rooted to her spot by the door, incapable of moving, limbs turned to lead, and it's a long time before she hears him finally step away on the other side. She watches his shadow disappear from crack beneath the door. 

_Playing with fire_, she thinks. _You're playing with fire_.

* * *

Mr. J isn't home the next morning. She sits up in bed, rubs the sleep out of her eyes. Her gaze lands on her green dress hanging over the door to her closet, the tear from where her heel had gotten caught when she fell clearly visible. Memories from last night flood her mind. Their exchange at the dance. After, with his fingers tangled up in the straps of her dress. What he'd said to her right before she'd managed to slip away. _I do know what I want._ They're building towards something hot. Something that'll scald. She knows that they are, the constant way they dance around this fire, circling and circling, getting closer with each pass, the heat of the flames almost unbearable, before they manage to yank themselves away at the last second. She doesn't know how much longer it can go on before someone gets burned.

In the kitchen, she checks the time, surprised that it's nearly noon. She must have been more tired than she thought. She retrieves a bowl of cereal and is dismayed to find there's no milk. She forgoes a spoon and munches on it dry, eating by the fistful.

She turns on the TV and sits Indian style on the couch, curling a blanket over her lap. The channel is set to the news, and she's too lazy to get back up and change it. She eats her cereal and only half pays attention, wonders instead where Mr. J is, what he might be doing. Sunlight streams in through the blinds, white and blinding. The snow glitters and winks beneath the sun, like it knows a secret that she doesn't.

"—at this time the death toll is confirmed to have reached over seven-hundred. Authorities are still working closely at the scene to assess the situation—"

Taylor sits up a little straighter, a cold wave of dread settling in her stomach, and somehow she already knows—she_ knows_. 

Her jaw slackens in horror as she hears the report, sees the news reporter standing outside her school. Noxious gas had flooded the gymnasium, pouring from the ceiling, misting down over the crowd like rain, and as a mass exodus towards the exits had begun, the crowd was horrified to discover that none of the doors would budge. Bodies had piled up against the doors as the fumes took over. Nobody was able to escape. Nobody from the outside had any idea. Not until it was too late.

She thinks back to Mr. J slamming that metal bar over the emergency exit. The timer on his watch. The map of Gotham in his room, the pushpin nailed directly over her school.

She's trembling as she flattens her palms against her face and sobs, open-mouthed, against her hands. She folds herself down into her lap, hunched over. Horrified. Afraid. The TV drones on in the background, but she doesn't hear any of it.

If she is playing with fire—just a little girl with matchsticks—then the Joker is a monster playing with gasoline.

And the terrible thing—the truly revolting, putrid, and unforgivable truth—is that in spite of all of this, in spite of all he's done, she still wants him.

She wants him. And she wants to be burned. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter kicked my ass. I've really agonized over this one. Does it absolutely suck as much as I think it does? I have to be completely honest, I never would have brought an idea like this to fruition if I had not been prompted with it. However, because so many of you requested wanting to see the Joker at one of Taylor's school dances, I felt I had no choice but to oblige. I struggled through every step of this chapter—I only hope that it's not painfully obvious as you're reading it.
> 
> Prompts I was able to fill during this two-part run of Blaze: Taylor angry and slamming the door in the Joker's face, the prompt "snow", the Joker smoking with his shirt off (you're welcome, Katrina), and, obviously, the masquerade ball/school dance.
> 
> Only have a few prompts left to fill (you can find the full prompt list on my blog), so if you want to see this anthology series continued, please don't hesitate to leave some ideas/requests. This story has become a lot more linear and cohesive than I had originally planned, which I am enjoying. I hope it feels like with each passing chapter, we're ramping up to something big. Chapter six is when shit is really going to hit the fan in a big way. I've never written anything like it before, and I can't wait to share it.


	6. Cauterize

_"There is something bleeding to death inside me but I don't know what it is."_

_—Ingeborg Bachmann_

Seventeen now.

Not a child anymore, but technically not yet an adult, either. Sometimes it's confusing, being caught in this in-between, like she's being pulled in two separate directions. The sunny warmth and safety of childhood innocence beckons her, calling sweetly for her return to its webbed cocoon, yet the bright and hot freedom of adulthood bursts like fireworks in the distance, an immediacy to it, like it needs her right_ now_.

There's something incongruous about the way she acts and looks, and the way she feels. None of it matches up.

She can't drink yet—not legally, anyway—and she doesn't have her license, but Mr. J teaches her how to drive over a series of weekends in one of those overnight commuter lots, and sometimes in the parking lot at the mall, at night, when she's bored and he finally succumbs to her begging.

Learning stick shift is hard, but he helps her push through it, even if she thinks he wants to strangle her sometimes, like when she drops the clutch too fast and sends the car to a grinding halt, or when she slams on the brake instead of easing into it—and that one time she accidentally backs into a streetlamp.

These are some of her favorite memories with him, these honey-warm summer nights with the windows rolled down, the hot nighttime wind, all the hours spent in dark, vacant parking lots, joined only by the sliver of pale moon and the buzzing streetlamps, their occasional stuttering flicker. On these nights, it's easy to get high from their sheer proximity; she lives for the moments his big hand comes down over hers on the gear shift, or when his glittering eyes meet hers in the darkness, fire bright with all the things they haven't said. She never knew silence could be so electric. Pale green dashboard light shifting over the hollows of his cheekbones, the Y-shaped scar on his lower lip, sliding over his throat when he lifts his chin, when he swallows. The headiness of their combined scents, sweat and frustration, her thighs glued to the leather seats, Mr. J's jacket strewn across the seat in the back and his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, sweat stains darkening the pits.

She can practically taste him on her tongue on these nights, the roof of her mouth burning with how much she wants him. She devours him with her eyes when he isn't looking, all of him—down to the marrow—wanting him so hard it hurts, all that tension coiled so tight in her jaw, her trembling hands. The steering wheel might've bruised beneath her grip if it could've.

Sometimes they finish her lessons with something sweet, an after-hours snack they share in the car. One night it's ice-cream, and as the vanilla stickiness drips all over the cone and onto her fingers, she catches him staring as she laps it up. Their eyes meet in the semi-darkness, something passing between them, some unidentified spark, and then he is reaching over across the console with a suddenness that is almost violent, turning the key in the ignition.

"Time to go," he says, voice pitched low.

She is too scared to look at him after that, afraid of whatever fire she'd accidentally lit inside him.

_I do know what I want._

He'd said that to her, almost six months ago now, and then they had never talked about it again. Never broached the topic. Dusted it under the rug where it lay in silent wait, all that terrifying possibility, like some ravenous jungle creature crouched low in the foliage, just waiting for the perfect moment to pounce. It was easier to pretend like it hadn't happened rather than summon her courage and act on what had.

She touches herself on those nights, afterwards, when they get home and part their separate ways. She's a big girl now, doesn't need to sleep in his bed anymore, even if she still desperately wants to. The way she used to come crawling to him with the leftover tendrils of a bad dream clinging to her peripheral, slipping into bed next to him, curling herself inside of his warmth. She liked breathing into his neck, touching his chest with her fingertips—feather-light, so he wouldn't wake—needing to feel the heat emanating off him, needing the reassurance that he was real. That he was right here. That he was hers.

But not anymore. Now that she sleeps alone, she is left with other vices.

It's hard to figure out at first—she's convinced she must be doing something wrong, not stimulating herself right. She's tried watching porn a couple of times, but her face burns so hot with shame she is practically dizzy from it. She can't see past the mechanics of it, of two oiled, naked strangers bent over a slippery couch in some overlarge room that is too echo-y, breasts like balloons about to pop, the cacophony of fake grunts and overzealous moans.

_Oh, yes, harder! Fuck me harder!_

She buries her phone beneath her pillow in shame. Hopefully Mr. J hadn't heard.

She tries other kinds of porn—women licking each other between their legs, slow, but eager, one woman's legs thrown over the shoulders of the other. It's different. Softer. That does stir something inside her, and she lays on her back and listens to the wet sounds of their mouths and their soft moans as she slips her fingers inside her underwear. But even then she can't manage to bring herself over the edge, only teeter back and forth at the brink of it, a pleasure she can chase but never sustain before it is slipping away, rushing out like the tide.

Is she broken? Is something wrong with her? Maybe she just isn't doing it right.

She worries her bottom lip and flips over onto her belly. She is so pent-up and hot, her room drenched in humidity that even the rickety fan in the open window can't help. Her sheets are sticky with sweat and clings to her legs, and she irritably pushes them off the bed with her feet and slides a hand between her legs again.

She thinks about earlier that night in the car with him. The quiet of the radio, her cheeks flushed from the heat and the exertion of trying to pay attention, gripping the steering wheel tight with both hands. It was the first time he had let her out on the open road, and it was dark—late—not many people out, but she still felt a little nervous.

"Where do you want me to drive?"

His head was leaned back against the headrest, body slouched low in the seat, eyes half lidded. He looked at ease, tired—almost peaceful, she thought. She'd rarely seen him with his guard down like this, his body so unwound.

He turned his head towards her and stared.

"Surprise me."

She took them onto the interstate, not sure where to go, just driving straight since that was easier, through the city, and then veering out of it, across Graham Bridge, until all the lights from the city faded into the distance, twinkling in the rearview mirror. Black and gold. The windows down, hot wind tousling her hair, the sky clearer out here, bigger—not buried underneath so much smog. It felt like driving through outer space, stars on all sides, the passing blur of cars like spinning planets. It was mesmerizing. She never wanted it to stop.

Like this, she could almost imagine they were running away from Gotham, maybe towards some fantastical, undisclosed location, somewhere where Mr. J didn't have to be the Joker, and they could just be happy together. Free. Some place where their story didn't have to end in tragedy.

The memory of his warm hand folding over hers for a moment on the steering wheel, telling her he would drive now, and she takes that memory and warps it, imagines his hand on her thigh instead. Imagines them parked on the side of the road, in the dark. She exhales a puff of air against her pillow, rocking her hips into the mattress, chasing the pressure of fingers, imagining his hand between her legs now, slipping past the elastic of her underwear, teasing, his eyes on her face while he does it, watching her as he slicks his long fingers through her folds, his mouth pressed to her ear, all hot, humid breath, whispering, _just look at you_—

Her orgasm is fast and bright, and she shouts at the intensity of it, clamping down on nothing, her thighs trembling as it rolls through her. She pants into the pillow as she comes down, boneless—_sated_—disarmed by the fact that she is capable of bringing herself so much pleasure.

Her face floods with shame after—was she too loud? Did. Mr. J hear?—but in that moment, as she struggles to catch her breath, it doesn't matter.

Her very first orgasm.

It felt so _good_.

* * *

In the following weeks, she starts looking for a job.

Mr. J doesn't like it at first—she knew he wouldn't—but in the end, she got him to cave. Maybe it's because school's let out for the summer, and he knows she'd be bored at home by herself all the time. Either way, she relishes in this new taste of freedom, like the sweet, lemony tang of yellow Starbursts—those are her favorite.

It's a struggle, in the beginning, to find a job that will even bother to look at her application. She doesn't know if it's because she's not eighteen yet, or because she doesn't have any prior work experience—but for a week she doesn't receive any phone calls, and she worries she listed the wrong number.

She puts together a resume for herself using the computer at the library, which she pays fifty cents an hour for. The paper is a dollar per sheet. She fills out some applications online, and then prints out a handful of resumes to take to whatever locations are hiring. Some places like it when you hand in your resume in person, that way they can put a face to the name—at least, that's what some of the anonymous people on Yahoo! Answers had said.

She applies at fast food joints, mostly, a few restaurants, places she feels like she's mostly likely to get hired. Food service seems her most likely bet, usually requiring the least amount of experience. A lot of places aren't hiring anymore, like the cushy retail jobs in the inner city where you can stand behind a register all day and snap your gum, read a magazine. Those were snatched up by other high schoolers who didn't wait until summer to stake their respective claims. She had nobody to blame but herself.

When she finally receives a call for an interview—some burger place, Bobby's, or something—she squeals and runs to tell Mr. J.

"That's great, pumpkin." He ruffles her hair, and even though it should exasperate her because she spent a lot of time on it that morning, she beams up at him and feels proud, for once, like she's proven something.

She chatters about it for the rest of the afternoon, following him around the house, asking him questions she doesn't wait for the answer to before she's barreling onto the next one. She clips his heel more than once as she follows him from room to room, but he doesn't say anything, just lets her talk. She sits on the counter in the bathroom and swings her legs while he shaves, and then she swivels around to put her feet in the bowl of the sink and decides to paint her toenails so they can both do something together, and even then she doesn't stop talking. She pauses only long enough to blow on her bright blue toenails, and then she tells him—a bit sheepishly—she hopes she can make some friends at her new job.

She pauses long enough to glance up at him, catches the way he arches his brow. He looks down at her over the slope of his nose, his razor hovering over his throat.

"I'm not _good enough_ for you anymore, hm?" he teases. At least she thinks he's teasing.

She feels her cheekbones coloring, and she ducks her head, resting her chin on her kneecaps so she can finish painting her pinky toe, but she's less focused than she was before.

"That's not what I meant," she mumbles. "You're my friend," she says after a moment, very quiet. She keeps her head down. "You're my best friend."

He doesn't say anything in response, but she bites her lip and braves a glance up, catches his secret smile in the mirror, meant only for him, before she ducks her head and tries not to blush all the way down to her toes.

Her high fades a little later, and she has to lie down on the couch to take an afternoon nap even though she doesn't want to. Mr. J hovers in her peripheral when she closes her eyes, watching, and she succumbs to sleep even as sunlight streams in through the windows.

She finally gets a call back one morning as she's lying in bed, watching the sunlight filter through the blinds, the way it stretches its long, warm fingers across the bedspread. The carpet. Mr. J is already gone for the day, she heard him get up earlier that morning, banging around in the kitchen as he always does. Sometimes she hears him stand outside her closed door in the mornings, and every time she thinks, _please come in_, but he never does, and she watches his shadow disappear from underneath the door a minute later before she drifts back to sleep.

Her cellphone hums next to her head, and she eagerly rolls over to answer it.

"Hello?" she says, and then clears her throat and says it again, less croaky this time.

"Is this Taylor Border?"

"Borden," she corrects. Sometimes her lowercase _N_s look more like lowercase _R_s. She really needs to work on that. "That's me." She bites her lip, holding her breath in anticipation as she waits for the voice on the other end.

"Yeah, this is Doug, from Bobby's Shake Shack."

She nods, even though he can't see it, sitting up straighter in bed. "Yes, sir." She remembers him. She had reached out and shook his hand when they'd met. He had seemed surprised by that, and it made her feel grown up and special, that she had just reached out and offered her hand like that. Very professional. Very adult-ish.

"Yeah, I was just calling about your interview on Tuesday, we, um—well, we decided to go with someone else, so we just wanted to let you know."

Taylor frowns into the phone. Someone—someone else? Her hearts clogs somewhere up in her throat, blocking her airway, and for a long beat she can't say anything. Can't breathe.

"You still there?"

"Y—yes," she manages. She swallows down her beating heart, exhales into the receiver. Tears prickle at her eyes, but she fights them off.

"Well—"

"I'm sorry, I just—can I ask why?"

This probably isn't professional, but she doesn't understand. She thought the interview had gone so well. What had she done wrong? Was it something she'd said? Was it what she was wearing?

She hears Doug let out a puff of air into the phone, can imagine him awkwardly scrubbing a hand over the sweat beading at the back of his thick neck, having to explain to some kid why she wasn't good enough or whatever, wondering about how to deliver a blow, but softly.

"Listen, you seem like a great kid, but we really can't hire people who aren't clean. Legally I'm—"

Taylor's back goes ramrod straight. "What do you mean 'clean'?"

Doug pauses. "The drug test. You came back positive—"

Taylor's heart threatens to burst straight out of her chest. "Positive for _what_?" She knows she keeps interrupting him, and it's rude, but she's so confused. She doesn't take drugs. She's _never _taken drugs. Clearly there's been some mistake—

"Uh, Benzos?" He says it like a question. "Couple of other things, I think." He coughs. Sounds uncomfortable. She can imagine his eyes darting around his little square office, the waterlogged walls, the exposed pipes on the ceiling. Stained carpet. The health inspector certificates in their dusty plastic frames mounted on the wall. The uncomfortable metal folding chair she had sat in when he'd gestured her into the cramped office for her interview. Eyes desperately searching, looking for points of escape. A viable exit.

"I—I don't know understand," she says, and the tears are coming now, she can hear the ugly warble in her voice starting to take shape, but she tries hard to fight it. "I don't take those," she explains, "I've never taken drugs in my life."

God, they must hear that all the time.

It's silent on the other end. She sniffles into the phone, wiping her nose with the back of her arm. She's pathetic.

"Listen," Doug says, and he sounds uneasy, "is there someone who could be giving those things to you without you knowing? There was quite a concoction in there, we don't usually see someone your age with that much stuff…."

Taylor's heart ricochets violently, like it's sitting up on hands and knees, beating on the walls of her ribcage. She wets her lips. "I—I don't know." But she does know. She knows exactly who could be giving her those things—even while her hindbrain hurries to reject the idea, eager to provide some other explanation.

He wouldn't. He _wouldn't_.

"Th—thank you for calling," she stutters, breathing fast. "I have to go."

"I think maybe—"

She hangs up. She doesn't need to know what he thinks. She pushes off the rest of her covers, horrified beyond comprehension. This can't be real. He wouldn't _do_ that… right?

He wouldn't, but he _has_, and all evidence points glaringly to nothing but that one ugly truth.

But… how? When? How _long_ has this been going on for? Is it recent, or has he always dosed her a little here, a little there?

And more than that—_why_? To what end? What was the _point_? Did he do this on purpose, knowing the moment she pissed in that cup, that it was over? That they'd tell her no? Did he really not want her to get a job that badly?

She stomps into the kitchen, tears streaking her cheeks, and flings open the cupboards like a woman gone mad. For the cabinets she can't reach, she pulls one of the barstools around the L-shape of the counter, the metal legs scraping against the floor like a war cry. She stands on it as she loots through dusty upper cabinets—especially the two above the fridge that nobody ever uses, but there's nothing. She doesn't know what she expected to find. He wouldn't hide it somewhere where she could potentially find it. He wouldn't risk it.

She's not… she's fucking _not_ going to cry about this.

She spends the better part of the day worrying holes in the carpet, pacing in the living room, and then her bedroom, mind turning a mile a minute as her brain tries to concoct some explanation for this, some justifiable reason for why he would do this, but she comes up empty every time.

She wants to know exactly what he gave her, and she wants to know _why_.

_He lied to me._

Her heart leaks something viscous and black at this admission, something pungent and metallic, like the way a cavity tastes and smells when it's drilled out, a sourness that coats her tongue. Her teeth. Her gums. She wants to vomit, but nothing will come, not even when she heaves uselessly over the toilet. Her body has nothing more to give.

By the time he returns home, Taylor's tears have long-since dried, and she is the picture of tranquility. She's cooked dinner. Cleaned up the house. She set the coffee table with their food—their makeshift dining table for when they don't feel like sitting at the counter.

Mr. J's brows shoot into his hairline, just for a moment, and then he surprises her by coming up behind her at the sink, wrapping the length of her ponytail around his hand until he holds it curled in his fist, gently tugging her to him. His chest is solid and warm at her back.

"What's all this for?"

His voice pitched low like that makes her spine curl, and she has to swallow down her thudding heart. She'll never be used to the affect he has on her, the way her body naturally seems to respond to him, like she was predestined to want him. Like she was made specifically for him, like her singular purpose is to ignite under his specific touch.

"Just thought I would do something nice." She smiles a little, craning her neck to look up at him, and she hopes he can't tell that it doesn't reach her eyes.

He hums, unwinds her hair from his hand so he can cup the back of her neck. Cradle her spine. "What would I do without you?" he murmurs.

It's a good question. One she's never asked before. What _would_ he do without her?

She's not going to tell him that she knows. Better to play the defensive, to watch his every move like a hawk—and she does.

It's frightening, having this knowledge, knowing something about him that he doesn't know. It feels… dangerous. She thinks about all the times she used to buy those little six-packs of sodas—an occasional treat for herself—and how the caps weren't always as tight as she thought they should be after she'd pulled one out of the fridge. Or sometimes how the water Mr. J brought for her was a little salty, and how she always blamed it on the pipes. It was water from the sink, after all, and it was an old house. She didn't exactly expect it to taste like water from a natural spring.

All the times she had fallen asleep during class, and then come home and napped again. What a struggle it was to keep her eyes open sometimes, how it felt like she was at war with her own body. How sometimes she had so much energy she thought she would burst through the roof, shoot straight off into outer space. Or when she couldn't stop running her mouth, driving Mr. J crazy with all her incessant chatter, how she couldn't stop eating, wanting, crying, lusting, touching. How she had operated on such extremes for the past two years of her life, since Nathan. Up, and then down, up… and then down, down, down, and up again, her body doing things she couldn't explain, her brain struggling to process, to keep up.

Was it all _him_? Had it always been because of him? Because of whatever he was drugging her with?

Her life had always been tumultuous; the frequency with which she was ushered from one foster home to the next, forced to change schools, and the stress and fear that came with living under an abusive or neglectful roof was enough to make anyone's head spin, let alone a little girl who'd spent her entire life in the foster system—but even then, there was a pattern, a certain level of regularity to her days, her moods. She didn't feel like she was going to spin in circles one moment and then collapse on the floor in a fit of exhaustion in the next.

A few nights later, when she's curled up in bed after another fruitless day of waiting for phone calls that never come, she notices the glass of water on her nightstand.

Before, she wouldn't have spared it a second thought, happily downing it, thinking that she'd poured herself a glass and then forgotten to drink it. Lukewarm water is better, anyway. Sometimes when it's cold it makes her stomach cramp.

Now, though, she stares at the glass with narrowed eyes. She gets out of bed and dumps the water in the bathroom sink, watches the drain gurgle it down. She checks the bottom of the glass for any leftover particles, any hint of residue, but there is none.

Doesn't matter. She already knows the truth.

It happens more and more frequently, the glasses of water sitting around—on her nightstand, the coffee table, the counter—water she knows she didn't pour. She dumps all of them down the sink when he isn't around. It escalates when Mr. J brings home takeout one night, and she knows she can't refuse—she never refuses food. It'd look too suspicious.

Her hands shake when she sits down on the couch, so she tucks them underneath her thighs, biting her lip as Mr. J dumps the plastic bag onto the coffee table and plops down onto the couch next to her. A Styrofoam box for him and for her; he likes General Tso's, she likes sweet and sour. He sets hers down in front of her and starts to dig into his own, popping open the lid, pulling it into his lap—

"Wait!" she blurts.

He raises his brows. Looks at her.

"Let's switch," she says. She pulls her hands out from beneath her thighs, looking at him imploringly. She doesn't know what she's going to do if he refuses—confront him? And does she really want to give up her hand so readily?—but in her haste it was the only thing to do.

It feels like he stares at her forever, like he's reading her mind and knows exactly what this is about. She tries not to shrivel under his dark gaze. But after a long moment, his face splits into lopsided grin.

"Stealing my food?" He _tsks_ at her.

Her face heats up. "I just feel like trying something different."

To her surprise, he acquiesces, sliding their Styrofoam containers around, and she thinks, _lucky save, _and tries not to look too relieved. As she settles back into the couch, Mr. J drums his fingers against the lid of his box.

"Forks," he drawls.

She frowns and glances into the empty plastic bag on the coffee table—the people at the restaurant must've forgotten to include them. She bites her bottom lip and looks up at him, and she understands. He wants her to get them.

Under normal circumstances, she'd be happy to. She practically jumps at the opportunity to please him, like an overeager puppy, and it occurs to her then how often she does things without needing to be asked—how he _knows_ this about her. He never volunteers himself for a task, because he knows she will respond to it first, without prompting. To respond any differently would be out of character at this point. Suspicious.

As much as she doesn't want to leave him alone with her food, she has no choice.

She gets up, goes to the kitchen as nonchalantly as possible, craning her neck behind her just once to glance at him, but he's unmoving on the couch, watching her. The forks are in the drawer next to the fridge, so she has to turn her back to him to get them, and the countertop blocks her view of him anyway from this angle. She slams the drawer shut a little louder than intended when she's done, trying to hurry, and then she's scurrying back into the living room to join him.

It doesn't look like he's moved an inch since she got up, but she knows he's fast, so she still can't be sure. She settles into the couch. Picks a movie for them to watch. She usually takes this opportunity to snuggle up next to him, lay her head on his shoulder if he'll let her. Instead she curls her legs underneath her and tentatively reaches for her food. Nothing looks amiss—not that she'd be able to spot if it was anyway. She doesn't really know what to look for. Still, she chews slowly, tasting every morsel, trying to decipher any usual flavors, but there's nothing.

She lies in bed later that night and stares at the ceiling, hypervigilant of her heartbeat, her breathing, but all she is conscious of is the sharpened claws of anxiety.

When Mr. J stands outside her closed door the next morning, she stares at it from under the safety of her covers and thinks, _don't come in_, and, like an answered prayer, he doesn't.

Her heart clenches when he walks away, traitorous, and deep down she knows that isn't what she wanted.

That isn't what she wanted at all.

* * *

Two weeks later, she lands a job.

It's a diner in midtown, and it's only part time, because all the full time positions were taken, but she needs the cash, and for now it will do. It's all she's got.

She stumbles into the diner off Marin Street in an effort to escape the blistering heat. She's spent the better half of the afternoon pounding the pavement, checking in on all the places she'd applied to, politely inquiring about the statuses of her applications; she'd read online that that was a good thing to do. Showed initiative. Drive. Or something like that. She hoped it didn't make her seem desperate.

But all anyone ever said when she asked was that they were no longer hiring, so she left with her head bowed, chin to chest, and tried not to let herself feel too dejected. She'd just have to go back to the library and print out more applications. Keep trying.

The diner was somewhere she'd been with Mr. J once before. It wasn't in the best area of town, but places like these were always safer for Mr. J—easier for him to keep his head down, stay low. People wouldn't recognize him out here, not in a place where he'd blend so easily.

She likes this diner though, with its checkered floors, everything chrome and shiny and apple red. The plump barstools that line the counter, the old-timey memorabilia plastered to the walls, the pin-up girl posters, the old license plates, weathered copies of TIME and newspapers from decades that exist now mostly in memory. The glow of neon signs in the shape of ice-cream cones and cheeseburgers, and the beautiful, sleek-looking jukebox. There is a curious mix of the old and the new, everything shiny and a little dusty at the same time. She likes the electric green ribbon of neon lights that line the edges of the ceiling, the digital glow they cast, especially at night, when the lights are all dimmed.

The place is bustling with activity when she shoulders in, the bell over the door announcing her arrival, though the sound is lost to the clamoring crowd of people just as desperate to escape the afternoon sun as she is. She'll just get a milkshake or something to cool down, and then she'll go home, she decides. But when she pulls open the glass door, she catches sight of the crooked 'HELP WANTED' sign plastered in the window, and she allows herself to feel a spark of hope.

Her 'interview' consists of following a tall, red-headed waitress around the diner, her curls piled high on top of her head, a few spirals escaping from her black scrunchie and sticking to the back of her neck, slick with sweat. She's got a tattoo of a black star on the back of her neck, too, just a little one, the size of a two thumbprints, with three smaller stars curled like a backwards 'C' next to it. Her wrists are thick with an assortment of colorful bracelets which jingle as she walks. Taylor has a hard time keeping up with her as she swirls around the diner, picking up empty glasses and plates and stacking them expertly in the crook of her arm as she goes, shooting rapid-fire questions at Taylor all the while. Have you ever worked in a restaurant before? Ever worked a register? Can you carry heavy trays? Can you work until close? Weekends?

She follows the waitress through a pair of swinging doors and into a sweaty, humid kitchen. It's like being transported into another world. She is rattled by the jarring clang of pots and pans, the chug of the dishwasher, the rapid _chop-chop-chop_ of a knife coming down against a wooden cutting board, the pop and sizzle of bacon and French fries, the clink of plates as they are deposited on the metal counter, ready for delivery. She can only blink at the frenzied blur of activity and try not to get in anybody's way.

"I'm taking my five!" the waitress yells, barely heard above the clatter.

She dumps off her collection of dishes and Taylor follows her through another set of doors, into a small, cramped room housing a set of lockers. A coat rack and a mini fridge. A small, dingy couch. Then their feet are pounding on mossy carpet, down a narrow, wood-paneled hallway lined with plaques and framed certificates, a couple of faded pictures that have been yellowed by time, two people shaking hands outside a sparkly clean diner, maybe when it first opened or something.

The waitress barrels through the door to the right, into a cramped office. It's hot in here. No windows. She nods for Taylor to take a seat as she stomps behind the desk and takes her own seat, reaching into the top drawer and pulling out a pack of Marlboro's, lighting one between her cupped hands and then pushing an errant curl off her forehead with the back of her forearm. She finally pauses long enough to look at Taylor, probably for the first time since Taylor had approached her at the counter with a timid, "Excuse me, ma'am?"

"Jesus, you're young," she says. She pushes the drawer closed, sucks in an urgent lungful of nicotine, like she is taking a deep breath of air after surfacing from a long, underwater excursion. She cranes her neck to expel the smoke away from Taylor, but keeps her eyes on her. They are a pretty, bright green—like cat eyes, she thinks—rimmed with mascara that is probably a couple days old. Her brows are sharp, penciled in, but they suit her. She has thin lines around her mouth and creased between her brows, and Taylor knows she's the kind of person who laughs a lot but is angry a lot, too, perhaps in equal measure. She has a long, oval-shaped face, and the freckles there are faint, canopied beneath a coat of powder that is too light for her skin tone. She's tan and sinewy, and the sleeves of her top are pushed up to reveal her shoulders, the freckles there like starbursts, happy and bright. Taylor has a hard time not staring at the paint splatter of freckles between the deep plunge of her breasts, all soft and pushed together, jiggling in her blouse every time she moves. She awkwardly looks away.

"So, um—"

"Can you start tomorrow?" the woman asks. She is already rummaging around in one of the lower drawers, sifting through a stack of papers. Her lips are clamped down around the cigarette, lodged in the corner of her mouth. "God fucking dammit," she says, to no one in particular.

Taylor presses her lips together. Waits.

"Here," she says, slapping down a thin stack of paper, sloppily stapled together at the corner. "If you fill these out, you can start tomorrow. Does two PM work?"

Taylor blinks at the proffered item, and then looks up to meet her expectant gaze. This is all happening so fast. A quick, fleeting glance at her name tag—she hadn't noticed it until now—reveals that her name is Ruby. Somehow, it fits.

"You—you don't want to ask me anymore questions? Or like… do a drug test?" She is nervous asking. That is exactly what she _doesn't _want. She has no idea how long the stuff Mr. J had given her could stay in her system. Was it days? Weeks?

Ruby snorts. "Sweetheart, no offense, but you look like you've never even _seen_ drugs." She pushes the papers further across the desk. "I can tell you're clean," she continues. "You're one of those goody two-shoes types." The end of her cigarette glows bright between her long fingers when she inhales. Her nails are painted fire engine red, but are starting to chip. "I have a third eye about these things."

Taylor nods, secretly relieved. She isn't going to argue with that. "I can start tomorrow," she replies.

Ruby smiles, baring straight, cigarette-stained teeth. "Good," she says. She dusts non-existent ash off the black apron tied around her waist, draped over a pleated mini skirt. "I only work on the weekends—better tips—but I'll set you up with Peggy tomorrow to show you the ropes. We really just need a hostess, someone to seat people during the busy hours. Think you can handle that?"

Taylor nods, eyes wide.

Ruby gestures to the papers on the desk for a final time and slides her a pen, which rolls across the wooden desk and onto the floor before Taylor can catch it. She reaches down to pick it up as Ruby is speaking.

"Go ahead and fill those out," she says, taking another drag, head tilted back, her eyes hovering over the edge of the desk, lingering on Taylor as she's bent over towards the floor.

Taylor doesn't need to be told twice. She retrieves the pen and scoots her chair a little closer to the edge of the desk so she can work on a flat surface, feels the weight of Ruby's gaze on her the whole time. Her cheeks flush beneath the woman's intense scrutiny, but she keeps her head bowed, scribbling as fast as she can. Her handwriting looks like shit because she's hurrying, but hopefully it's still legible. She isn't sure if she should put her real address—maybe Mr. J wouldn't like that. She scrawls down a fake one instead, beads of sweat sliding between her shoulder blades and the small valley of her breasts.

"You'll be a fast learner," Ruby murmurs as Taylor's pen scratches against the paper. "I can tell."

When Taylor finishes, Ruby stamps out her cigarette on the corner of the desk and stands to file the paper away in a gray filing cabinet tucked along the wall.

Taylor takes the opportunity to study her while she's occupied, her eyes trailing from head to toe and back again, and she is startled to realize that there is something about the woman that kind of reminds her of Mr. J. Maybe it's her inability to sit completely still, or the way her eyes glitter with the promise of something dangerous, something venomous. Maybe the way she looks at Taylor, like she knows a secret that Taylor doesn't. Either way, Ruby is like a firestorm—bright hot and fierce, smothering you inside a blanket of roaring flames before you even have a chance to shelter yourself from the onslaught. She is smoldering with her red hair and matching nails, her slightly crooked grin. The energy she radiates is fever hot. Manic. It's not unlike Mr. J at all.

Taylor swallows down her disquiet, feeling almost a little winded just from the exertion of watching her talk and move and breathe. It's a lot to take in, but she thinks she likes her.

The filing cabinet lets out a metallic, screeching whine when the drawer is forced open, and Ruby pauses a second later, her brows drawing together.

"Diamond District," she muses, eyeing the address Taylor had put down. Her eyes slide towards Taylor's. "Nice area… kind of far from home though, yeah?"

There's something almost vaguely threatening in her voice, hidden beneath a saccharine sheen, but Taylor swallows. Nods. It's where Emily lives—where rich people live. She doesn't know why she put that address. Maybe that was a mistake.

Ruby cocks her head, staring, her forearms propped along the edge of the filing cabinet. Taylor can see the lean muscles in her biceps when they're braced like that.

Ruby seems to smirk a little, her eyes glittering. "Do mommy and daddy know you're here?"

Taylor feels a prickle of annoyance at that—like she's a lost child or something. Like she doesn't belong in a place like this. She sits up a little straighter. Pushes her shoulders back.

"My parents know where I am," she says, maybe a little snobbish. It's weird saying 'my parents' out loud, but her voice is clear cut. Sharp.

Ruby hums in reply.

Whether or not she buys the lie, Taylor isn't sure, but she snaps the filing cabinet shut a moment later. And then she is smiling, all traces of previous tension dispelled. She touches the back of Taylor's chair, hip cocked, and for some reason the hairs on the back of Taylor's neck prickle. She bites her lip and inclines her head, her eyes sliding up to meet Ruby's.

"Let's get you a uniform. I gotta get back on the floor."

* * *

Ruby was right about one thing—she _is_ a fast learner.

Her job is menial—easy—but she already really likes it. She trains for three days; three wonderful, stressful, overwhelming days, forced to digest a whirlwind of information: names to remember, seating arrangements, policies, instructions, tasks, but on the fourth day they set her loose. She stands ramrod straight at the podium, bouncing on her heels a little anytime she sees customers approach. She is chirpy and bright when she assists them to their booth, lays down their laminated menus on the slightly-sticky table and gives them their napkin-wrapped utensils. They clink when she sets them down. She gets them ice water with lemon to start, and tells them their server will be right there in just a minute.

It's fun, mostly. She likes it. The most exciting part is just being out of the house—and she likes people-watching, too, when she can get away with it. She's already witnessed a breakup, several drunken fights, and what she thinks might've been a gang meeting, but she isn't one-hundred percent sure about the last one.

It's a little more stressful on the weekends—sometimes they have to make people wait for an open table, and that makes her feel anxious, the way people look at her sometimes, like she's personally responsible for the fact that they can't be seated right away. Like she's doing it on purpose.

Her coworkers are fine. Peggy is nice. Single mom, three kids. She's a little older than Ruby, but somehow less weathered, a lot softer around the edges. She's sweet but kind of quiet, like she's got a million different things on her mind, but she's approachable, and she never makes Taylor feel bad when she has to ask a question. She has night classes at GCC—Gotham Community College—and is doing her prerequisites. She wants to be a nurse. Taylor thinks Gotham is probably a shitty place to be a nurse. Peggy is a hard worker though, and she always finds ways to keep busy, even when it's slow. She tells Taylor there's always work to be done as long as you're willing to do it. She shows Taylor how to refill the napkin dispensers, and keep the ketchup bottles full, the salt and pepper shakers, how to wrap the silverware in their little napkin blankets. Taylor sweeps a lot, too, clearing out the debris beneath a table after a customer leaves, around the hostess's stand, and the rubber-bottomed carpet by the entrance. When things are really slow, she mops. Tidies up the bathrooms. The men's bathrooms are the worst, and the urinals lined along the wall somehow always make her blush.

She gets along with everybody for the most part. The kitchen staff in the back is all men—except for a Russian lady who speaks very broken English. She mostly does food prep. Her features are crisscrossed with hard lines, like she came out of the womb scowling and her face got stuck that way; Taylor has never seen her smile, not once, and she tries to stay out of the older woman's way. Luckily, she's not in the kitchen that much, so it's not hard to do.

The waitresses are all nice, and they seem to like her. It's a hodgepodge of older women and college dropouts who are working two other jobs on top of this one. They usually come in a little late for their shifts, and they head straight to the bathroom to change out of the uniform from their other job before hitting the ground running. Taylor tries to help them out when she can. Sometimes she'll bring the food out to the table if they're busy with another customer, or get their check ready for them if she knows what they've ordered. She likes paying attention to that stuff.

Hank—her boss—is the owner of the place, but Taylor hasn't met him yet. She's never even seen him. When she asks about him, Peggy tells her to keep her distance, but then backtracks when Taylor asks why.

"Just—he's fine, honey, really." She's refilling the napkin dispensers at the counter with the sort of practiced ease of someone who's done it a million times. Taylor is sitting on one of the barstools with her legs crossed, her chin in her hand, watching. "It's just better if you stay out of his way." She smiles at Taylor in that kind of sad, motherly way that women sometimes do, like they're afraid you're too little or too naïve to understand the world's terrible, nasty secrets. But Taylor already knows nastiness. She's seen it by the fistful. She's been forced to kneel at its mercy more times than she can count.

"Why can't you just tell me?"

Peggy seems surprised by her insistence, but she smooths out her frown and adopts a look of easy passivity. Her gaze lands on something behind Taylor.

"You have a customer," she says, gently, and Taylor's eyes widen as she untangles her legs and hurries to the hostess's stand to greet them. She hadn't even heard them come in. She tucks two menus under her arm and leads the couple to their table, but not before making a mental note to ask Ruby about Hank later. Sounds like there's a story in there, and she wants to know what it is.

Taylor's hours are all over the place, but she doesn't really mind. Sometimes it's so slow she only works for four hours before they cash her out early and tell her to go home, and other time she works ten-hour shifts because they're swamped and need the extra help. They pay her under the table, too—she likes that. No cashing checks at the bank or having to wait till the end of the week for a paycheck. She stashes her money under her mattress just like she used to. Old habits and all that.

She picks up extra shifts when she can—just because it's nice to be out of the house and around people. With school out for the summer, there's not a lot to do, and she isn't going to sit around at home all day and pine for Mr. J, especially not after her discovery. She still doesn't know what to think about that. She needs time to process. To think. The job makes it easier to keep her distance, and right now she likes that.

She's a couple weeks in now. The initial summer rush has died down some, and she's getting used to some of the regulars that come around, memorizing their routines, their orders, which ones always leave the best tips.

It's a Tuesday, so it's a little slow. Midafternoon, so the dinner rush won't be for another couple of hours. Plenty of time to mill around and try to find stuff to do.

Peggy is working today, and has spent the better part of the morning tucked in one of the barstools at the end of the counter, curled up with her textbook, tapping her highlighter against her chin. She has an exam coming up. She'd looked harried when she came into work earlier that morning, like she hadn't slept all night, and Taylor didn't miss the familiar ring of purple around her neck, faint, because she'd dusted over it with a thick layer of powder. She watched Peggy slip into the bathroom every so often and come out with a fresh layer, loose, tan-colored talc sprinkled over the front of her shirt like powdered sugar. Taylor doesn't ask about it, but she thinks she overheard Peggy talking to one of the other girls about an ex-husband or something. Taylor feels bad for her, so she doesn't press, and she tries not to bother her. She waits on her tables so Peggy doesn't have to, and the older woman glances up from time to time to offer a feeble smile, her gratitude etched in her tired eyes, and Taylor nods in understanding. She's happy to help.

When things die down even further, she decides to tackle the shelves underneath the counter—far enough away from Peggy so as not to disturb her—and starts unloading all the extra plates and cups and extra supplies from below. It's probably been years since someone wiped down these shelves, and she's determined to tackle the thick blanket of dust that's accumulated.

She's almost finished when she spots one last item, tucked all the way inside a far, hard to reach corner. She's able to heave the cardboard box onto the counter, pokes her head inside. It's a bunch of garland and tinsel, some red bows. Decorations for the holidays.

"That doesn't go there."

Taylor startles at the deep voice. She spins around, hands bracketed against the counter behind her. Her eyes slide up a long torso to meet a pair of honey-brown eyes. The faintest hint of a smirk.

She wrings her hands, nervous, for some reason. "I know, I was just—"

"You're new," he says. The man—definitely a man, he's older than her for sure, although she's not sure by how much—is wearing black jeans and t-shirt, a stained, white apron knotted at the back of his neck. He looks her up and down, crossing his arms over his broad chest, and she can't help but flush under his scrutiny. His eyes are curious. Bright. He's one of the kitchen guys, she thinks. The dishwasher. She's never talked to him before.

She nods. Swallows.

"I'm Ben." He says it like she'd asked.

"Um, I'm Taylor," she offers, even though it's on her nametag.

"I know who you are."

She thinks she says something back, maybe _oh okay,_ or _nice to meet you_, but her voice is lost to the sound of ringing in her own ears. She bites down on her lower lip and stares. Everything about him is _big_, and standing so close to him allows her the opportunity to drink in his features: his overlarge nose, his wide, full mouth, the scatter of dark freckles and misplaced moles, the crinkle around his eyes. A head of thick black hair and side-swept bangs. A goatee and thin mustache. A bulbous Adam's apple. It's like looking at a painting, or one of those statues in museums—a bust—all his features so prominently defined, like they'd been chiseled that way. He's oddly attractive, handsome in a way that's almost kind of puzzling.

He towers over her, long-limbed and gangly, yet his broad chest is unmistakable, she can tell from the way his shirt stretches across his chest, how his biceps fill in the sleeves. She notes his thick arms and big hands. Long fingers. His body is all there, but the way he holds himself is curious, as if he hasn't moved into his own body quite just yet, like he isn't entirely comfortable with the changes his body have made. It's as if his body had somehow managed to move on without him before he'd had a chance to catch up to it.

When he uncrosses his arms and wipes his hands off on his jeans, it occurs to her that he might be a little nervous, too. Weird.

"Well, I should—"

"Here, let me help you with that." He nods towards the box on the counter and takes a step forward. "I saw you struggling with it earlier. Looks heavy." He picks it up before she can protest, and she watches his eyebrows raise, his lips twisting in amusement. "Or maybe not," he chuckles. He makes a point of staring at her arms. He surprises her when he shifts to cradle the box to his chest with one arm, and then reaches out to gently pinch the thin skin beneath her upper arm. "You got any muscle in there at all?" he teases, and then looks a little embarrassed that he had done that.

She pulls back. She wants to be offended—she _should _be offended—but she can't help but feel charmed by the warm laughter in his eyes, his goofy attempt at flirting—if that's what this is. She kind of hopes it is.

"I'm stronger than I look," she retorts, and it comes out haughtier than she expected.

His eyebrows shoot up again, and he draws his free hand back as if to say, _well, pardon me then_. "You must hit the gym _hard_, huh?" He leans forward, all serious business. When he eyes her up and down—for a second time—she tries not to squirm. "What's a little thing like you bench press? Three pounds?"

She lets out a sound of righteous indignation, trying to be angry, but a smile tugs at her mouth a moment later, one she can't hide. He smiles, too.

She doesn't know how long they stand there grinning at each other, but eventually Ben clears his throat and lifts the box up a little higher.

"So, uh—"

"Oh!" she starts. "Let me finish real quick. I was just wiping down the shelves." She spins around and kneels, ducking beneath the counter and stretching into the far, hard to reach corner to wipe free the dust.

When she stands back up, Ben is staring at her. She watches his throat bob when he swallows, his knuckles white where he clutches the edges of the box. She flushes a little, feeling embarrassed for some reason—why is he looking at her like that?—and scoots out of his way so he can slide the box back into its rightful place.

When he stands, he catches his head on one of the low-hanging light fixtures.

"Ow… fuck," he says, rubbing the back of his head.

Taylor giggles, unable to help herself, and when he turns to look at her, she presses her lips together and tries to hide her smile behind the palm of her hand.

"Sorry," she mumbles, but her eyes betray her.

"Guess I deserved that."

She nods, biting her lip, and Ben looks sheepish as he rubs the back of his head.

He shuffles back to the kitchen after that, a little bashful—maybe humbled, too— and mumbles something about seeing her around. She bites her lip and watches him go.

Later on the in the week, when it's slow, Taylor picks a booth by the front windows—close to the hostess's stand—and slides into the booth with a bucket of loose silverware. She likes to sit here and roll the silverware into napkins when it gets slow. Sunlight streams in through the windows, falling across the table in warm stripes, and it catches on the silver tops of the salt and pepper shakers and the metal stand holding the placard of desserts.

One of the waitresses—Olivia, who Taylor doesn't know that well—feeds a couple of quarters into the jukebox, and something soft is playing, Put Your Heard on My Shoulder by Paul Anka, she thinks.

She sips on Pepsi through a straw while she works, taking precious care in folding the napkins just right. She's done it a hundred times by now, but she doesn't like for it to look sloppy.

"Ah, our powerlifter hard at work."

She looks up, surprised. Ben is squinting down at her, the sun shining directly in his eyes, turning them golden brown.

"How's your head?" she retorts.

Ben grins, doesn't wait for an invitation as he slides himself into the seat across from her, all 6'3" of him, his knees knocking into hers for a moment.

"You know, I _was _going to help you with the silverware, but now you can forget it."

She laughs. He reaches into the bucket for a fork, and she keeps her head bowed as she lifts her eyes—just slight—to watch as he runs the tines along the palm of his hand, tracing the lines there.

"So, you live around here?" he asks.

She looks up to find him staring at her.

"Um, yeah," she swallows, suddenly thinking about her lie, the fake address scribbled on the sheet that is currently tucked in the filing cabinet in the back office. She hadn't thought about it before, but what if they try to send her mail to that address or something? "How about you?"

"I'm in Old Town," he says, like this is a major pain in his ass. He lets out a huff of air between pursed lips, scattering the bangs on his forehead. "You in school?"

"Just graduated," she says, a hint of pride in her voice. The silverware clinks quietly together as she tucks it into the napkins with methodical precision. "You?"

Ben chuckles, looking almost embarrassed as he surveys the empty diner, looking anywhere but at her. "Nah."

She cocks her head at him. "How old are you?" she asks.

"Twenty-six."

"Oh. That's cool," she assures. She doesn't want him to think she's uncomfortable about the fact that he's so much older. She doesn't care about that. She just wants him to like her. "Are you in college?" she prompts.

"Was. I dropped out after a year. Did the Army thing, too. Wasn't for me."

Her eyes widen. "Did you ever, like, have to go to the Middle East?"

Ben snorts. "Farthest I ever went was Fort Benning. Hot as fuck down there."

Taylor blushes at the expletive, keeps her eyes down. Mr. J doesn't talk like that. She watches the silverware glimmer in the sunlight. Smooth and shiny.

"So why here?" Ben asks, gesturing around the empty diner with a lazy sweep of his arm; he's got moles scattered there, too. "What brings a lady such as yourself to our fine, reputable establishment?"

He puts on a tone of exaggerated nobility, and Taylor chuckles as she sets down a triad of silverware. "I applied to a billion places," she says, thinking back to her myriad of unanswered applications. "This is the only one that would take me," she shrugs.

Ben studies her for what feels like a long time. "Well, you're lucky you got in." His voice is deep—low—almost hypnotic in the quiet of the diner. It's so different from the often nasal quality of Mr. J's speech. "Ruby must've really liked you."

"She seemed kind of desperate," she says, honestly.

Ben smirks at her. "Well, we're always hiring fresh meat."

Taylor frowns at him. She can't tell if he's teasing her again or not. "Fresh meat?"

"Shit." Ben looks up suddenly, somewhere behind her, maybe catching the clock on the wall. He tosses the fork back into the bucket with all the other clean silverware—but not before making a show of licking the tines, his long, broad tongue flattening on the underside. Taylor is transfixed as he does it. Afterwards, he winks at her, and Taylor can only blink at him. "Gotta go."

Ben leaves just as suddenly as he had come, but a second later he is circling back, kneeling onto the booth behind her and leaning over the back of her seat. His breath is warm on her ear.

"Keep up with the weights, powerlifter. Maybe one of these days I'll let you spot me at the gym."

"Don't let any light fixtures hit you on your way to the kitchen," she throws coolly over her shoulder.

Ben slips away, and she turns in her seat to catch him grinning to himself.

She turns back around, and she can't help it—she's grinning, too.

When she glances back into the bucket of silverware, she gingerly plucks out the fork he'd licked. He's funny—but that was definitely gross.

* * *

Their relationship progresses over the next several weeks, as summer melts slowly on. Time is weird in the summer—strange, she thinks—sometimes moving so impossibly slow it's as if autumn will never come. One summer day bleeding into the next, and the next, ad infinitum, but then by August, the clock turns harried, frantic, and summer blasts to the finish line as if pulled there by centrifugal force.

Things between them start out slowly at first, Ben meandering out of the kitchen during the midafternoon and nighttime lulls to talk—killing time—trailing at her heels like an oversized puppy, hungry for her attention, for some reason, which she is always happy to give. She likes having his attention—maybe because no one's ever paid her this much attention. No one except Mr. J.

Ben watches her fold silverware—Taylor sitting in her usual booth so she can keep an eye on the hostess's stand—or occupies one of the barstools while she refills the napkin dispensers, the glass ketchup bottles, the salt and pepper shakers. His chin in his hand while she spritzes the windows or wipes down the counters or mops the floors. Sometimes he comes out and helps her bus tables when it's really busy. They even have a little system worked out. He loads the dishes into the bucket propped against his hip, and she quickly wipes down the tables, rearranges the salt and pepper and the maple syrup, sets everything up for the next guest. They work well together that way.

Ben is, in a word, awkward—but it's paired with such an unhealthy dose of sheer _ego _that it weirdly balances itself out. Some days she doesn't know what to make of his erratic behavior, the way he practically bounces off the walls one minute with an energy and vivacity that is unparalleled in nature, and then in the next minute is sulking and miserable, lumbering around the diner with all the force of a storm cloud just waiting to burst; she's since then learned that initiating contact during these times is like asking to be struck by lightning.

He's volatile—different from the volatility she's come to expect from Mr. J—with a temper that often borders on infantile. But he's easy to calm down after he's had a smoke, or punched his locker. Sometimes he overturns a few chairs in the breakroom, or slams a few pots and pans around in the giant metal sink, or goes out back to howl his frustrations at the sky at the top of his lungs, hands fisted in his hair like he's going to rip it out. Sometimes she hears an enraged _fuck! _from the kitchen, and she knows it's him. She smiles apologetically at the customers at the counter and makes a point of staying out of the kitchen until he's calmed down.

But Ben is sweet, too. For all of his bravado, there's something almost virginal about him, too, an over-eagerness that seems to betray the fact that he's never gotten his dick wet, but Taylor can't be sure. Like, sometimes it's the way he stares at her chest, like he's caught in some kind of trance, and she has to tap him on the arm to bring him out of it. His face heats up in embarrassment afterwards, which makes_ her_ embarrassed, and then they both have to look at anything else but each other until the moment passes. And he touches her a lot, too, and sometimes it's like he has no concept of personal space; always standing too close, finding ways to press himself up against her, practically connected at her hip when they're sitting next to each other. She catches him staring at her legs, too, and her ass, and there probably isn't a body part of hers that he _hasn't_ ogled, but she doesn't really mind it because it makes her feel wanted. And she really, really wants Ben to want her, even if she doesn't fully understand why.

He's manic, and funny, and messy, and _huge_, and being around him is like basking in the sun, if the sun weren't millions of miles away and was instead right in front of your face. The attention he feeds her makes her toes curl though, and they both seem to want whatever the other has to offer in equal measure.

Sometimes she joins him out back by the dumpsters when he takes a smoke break, and she sits on the stack of waterlogged wooden pallets, legs dangling above the pavement, while he leans against the brick building opposite her and watches her through swirls of smoke.

They talk constantly, and lapses of silence are rare. She likes talking to him. It's easy—different than it is with Mr. J, who usually just listens and only interjects occasionally. With Ben, it's like they can't get their words out fast enough, both of them tripping over the enormity of everything there is to say. They hang off each other's words, waiting impatiently for the other to finish so they can elbow in with their own thoughts and opinions. Ben asks her a lot of questions about her life, full of genuine curiosity, and she finds herself opening up to him in a way she hasn't opened up with anyone else before. She blossoms in his hand like a flower, and he provides her with the patience and attentiveness to do so. For the first time in a long time, there's no shame tethered to her honesty, and she tells him things about her past that's she never told anyone—things she's always felt too embarrassed or too afraid to say out loud. But Ben doesn't judge her, just quietly nods his head, brows furrowed like he knows exactly where she's coming from, and it makes Taylor's heart swell with something she's never felt before. She feels heard. _Understood_.

They talk about the orphanage, and her foster families, the giant question mark that is her parents. She wonders aloud what they might've been like, if they're still alive, and why they didn't want her, and Ben says _fuck them for abandoning you _and _you deserve better_, and Taylor shrugs halfheartedly, unsure about it, even though there's something about Ben's words that warms her from the inside out, maybe the fact that his sentiment is so full of passionate, self-righteous anger; just another demonstration of the ways in which he cares for her.

He tells her things about his own life, too. His failed attempts at community college—he'd studied to be an electrician—the Army, his futile efforts to guide his little sister down a different path than the fate that had befallen their mother, who had overdosed six years ago. His dad, an alcoholic, had been out of the picture since he was a kid, _good fucking riddance_. Ben is very emphatic—cogent in the way he describes his upbringing, his life—like bad things just keep happening to him which he has no agency over. He is the victim in every single story, and nothing is ever his fault. Taylor's heart bleeds for him. It did seem like life had handed him a particularly awful deck of cards. Whenever he finishes telling her about some terrible thing that had happened to him, he always lightens the mood afterwards by cuffing her on the cheek and telling her that meeting her made all the bad stuff worth it. She always ducks her head and blushes, happy but also flattered that she clearly means so much to him.

After a while, Ben takes to walking her to the bus stop at night. She waits for him out back after her shift ends since it usually takes him a while to finish all the dishes, and then they walk the half mile it takes to get to the bus stop. They sit underneath the plastic overhanging together, talking in the dark, the city a blur of white and gold around them, the night air warm like candlelight, the pavement still hot from the earlier assault of the sun. He entertains her with anecdotes of the day and spot-on impressions of their coworkers, and she laughs until her cheeks are sore and flushed with heat. When the hiss of brakes alerts them of the bus's arrival and they go to stand, Ben scoops her off her feet from behind, and she lets out a sharp peal of laughter, urging him to let her go. When he whispers, "_What if I don't?_", heat unfurls somewhere in her lower belly, so delicious and hot that she can barely think straight. He's a little sweaty, the stench of bleach and fried food and nicotine clinging to his clothes, but she thinks she likes the way his arms feel around her.

She waves to him from the window once she's seated, and Ben jogs after the bus as it pulls away, yells something to her that she can't hear, but she deciphers the word "powerlifter" from the shape of his mouth, and she knocks on her head with her fist and spits her tongue out at him.

One day at work, Ben is particularly quiet, and Taylor thinks something is wrong, her brows furrowing together in her concern, but during their lunch break—which they almost always take at the same time now—he grabs her wrist and pulls her out back.

"I was trying to hold off until tonight to show you, but I can't wait any longer."

"What is it?"

Ben urges her through the back door and they spill out into the alley, where a splash of yellow sunlight slicks the brick wall of the laundromat next door, like spilled paint. He gestures with both hands to the car parked there, grinning so hard she's afraid his face will split in half from the strain.

"Oh, my god!" she squeals. "You bought a car?"

"Bet your ass I did." He looks unbelievably proud, standing there like he built the thing himself. "It's an utter piece of _crap_," he says, "but it's got a sun roof."

"Wow."

Taylor edges closer, excited for him as she peers inside. It's got leather interior. That's nice, she thinks.

Ben watches her, leaning up against the passenger door and crossing his arms. "Wanna go for a ride?"

Taylor blinks up at him. "Right now?"

He laughs. "Not _now_. Later—tonight."

"Oh." She's not sure if Mr. J would like that—in fact, she _knows_ Mr. J wouldn't like that. It _screams_ 'bad idea'… but it thrills her to imagine going somewhere with Ben. Just the two of them. Maybe Mr. J doesn't have to know. He's usually not home when she gets back from work anyway.

She tugs her lower lip into her mouth, thinking, and after a moment, she meets Ben's eyes, smiling.

"Let's do it."

* * *

She vibrates for the rest of the day, excited for later that night. When it finally happens, she's surging with electricity as she slides into his car after their shifts have ended. It was a long day, made all the longer by her impatience. He holds open the door for her as she gets inside—Mr. J does that sometimes—but it feels different when Ben does it. Everything feels different with Ben.

He walks around to the driver's side, tosses his apron in the backseat and closes his door. Turns the key.

"Been saving up for a car for so fucking long."

"I just learned to drive," she chirps, proud, sitting up straight in her seat. She hasn't been able to share this accomplishment with anyone other than Mr. J. "I don't have a car though, unless I borrow mister—I mean, my uncle's—but I don't think he'd let me."

She buckles her seatbelt and looks over at him, but Ben doesn't seem to be listening to her, too busy adjusting the dials on the dashboard.

"I'm gonna install a nice bass system, too, you know? Something that makes the windows shake."

She wrinkles her nose at the idea but doesn't say anything.

"Now I can drop you off at home after work," he says, matter-of-fact. "Where did you say you live again?"

Taylor bites her lip. That's_ definitely _not a good idea.

"Ben, you really don't have to do that…"

"No, I want to. You shouldn't ride the bus so late at night anyway. I'm surprised your uncle lets you do that."

She doesn't argue. Maybe she can get him to drop her off a few blocks from the house or something. It'd be nice getting to spend more time with him after work.

He pulls out of the mostly-empty parking lot, slipping into dark, wet streets. It had rained all day, the sky overcast and slate gray from sun up to sun down, but it had brought in a nice lunch crowd and a pretty good dinner crowd, too, people looking to escape the rain. There's only a light drizzle now, the air a little cooler, not as taut and high-strung with humidity. Lightning flashes intermittently in the distance, but there's no thunder. The air conditioning makes goose bumps pimple over her bare legs and thighs, and she tries to pull her skirt a little lower.

They talk as usual, filling up the silence as Ben shifts gears, eases into the feeling of driving a car he's not totally familiar with yet. He just bought it yesterday.

"Maybe I can finally get out of this fucking place," he mutters, mostly to himself, but she doesn't miss the bitterness colored in his voice.

"You don't like it here?"

"You do?" He casts her a sidelong glance, one hand braced on the wheel at six o'clock. "Even after all the shit you've been through with foster parents and the orphanage? Don't you want to leave? Get out of this shithole?"

Taylor stares down into her lap. She's never thought about it. She's never thought about leaving Mr. J, striking it out on her own. What would she do? Where would she go? Gotham is her home—it's all she knows.

"I guess I haven't really thought about it," she says, honest and sheepish. Why does everyone else seem like they've got everything all figured out except for her?

"Maybe I'll move out west. Live in California, you know? Learn to surf or whatever. You ever been?"

She shakes her head. California sounds nice. Maybe. Palm trees and stuff. San Francisco and L.A. Celebrities. Redwoods. She doesn't really know that much about it.

"You could come with me," Ben says after a moment, downshifting into another gear, looking at her out of the corner of his eye. "Be a movie star out there."

She replies with a sound of indignation. "_Seriously_?"

"Yeah, you've like, got that look about you." He scrubs a hand over his mouth, like he's deep in thought. "I mean, obviously you're shy, but I bet you could be great if you really tried, maybe win an Oscar or something."

Taylor flushes all the way down to her toes. Ben is so effusive with his praise sometimes that it's practically blinding in its radiance. She reaches down to grip the sides her seat, feeling weightless, like she might float away if she doesn't anchor herself.

"And, hey, if that doesn't work out," Ben glances at her, "you can always go _Arnold Schwarzenegger_ on everyone's asses. Join the wrestling circuit. Impress them with all that _muscle_."

Taylor rolls her eyes, biting back a grin. "You're never going to let me live that down, are you?"

"Only because it embarrasses you so much." He grins. "And you're cute when you blush."

This comment only serves to make her redden even further. God, is this something she'll ever grow out of?

They're on some back road now, and Taylor isn't exactly sure where they are or where they're going, only that it's really dark without any streetlamps. She hadn't even noticed them fade away until now. The yellow headlights attempt to patch through the darkness, but the mixture of steam and fog rising from the pavement is thick, enveloping the exterior of the car in a ghostly blanket. It's kind of creepy out here. Quiet.

She catches sight of some drooping powerlines, and trees on either side of the road. Lots of trees.

"Hey, Ben—" she starts, nervous.

He's wearing a shit-eating grin, ignoring her. "Come on, show me the muscles." He's reaching across the console for her upper arm, and Taylor shifts away from him, her eyes darting to the road. It's barely visible through the fog now, and he's driving really fast.

"Ben—"

"No, come on, just flex them once. Don't hold out on me now—"

"Ben—BEN!" she screams. The road in front of them curves sharply, and Ben swears, swerving the wheel, but it's too late.

The car careens off the road with a speed that's terrifying, and there's no time to think, no time to process anything but the fear that seizes her lungs, paralyzing her in the long, drawn-out seconds it takes for the car to crash violently through the woods. Taylor is yanked forward, held back partially by the seatbelt, but her head still collides with the window, or maybe the dashboard, and then there is nothing else but darkness.

_To be continued in Part ll…_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I hate that I couldn't give you guys what I promised you in the author's notes of the last chapter—but this chapter completely ran away from me, and, once again, I found myself having to split the chapter in half due to length. Chapter seven will be well worth the wait, if you can stick around for it.
> 
> If you haven't received them yet, review replies for the previous chapter(s) are forthcoming. Thank you all so much for reading, each and every one of your reviews is invaluable to me, I cannot stress that enough. Recently I've heard from several readers who've stated they've felt nervous about reviewing in the past—please don't be. I want to take this time to assure you guys that every single review is so incredibly important to me, even if you feel like you don't have much to say. I'm here, writing this story, because of you guys.
> 
> Also, I don't bite—unless you like that kind of thing.


	7. Cauterize, Part ll

_“Lay down_  
_Lay down and wait like an animal.”_  
_—Charles Bukowski_

Pine.

She smells that first. The cool, zesty burst of evergreen. Something else, then, too—damp earth, the shiver of wet leaves—and the chemical stink of smoke that creeps through her nostrils and snakes down her throat, making it burn. Making her eyes water.

Her head is _throbbing_.

Something warm trickles down the right side of her face, and when she tastes the bite of copper in her mouth, she knows it’s blood. She whimpers, reaches up to touch her temple—gingerly, with just the pad of her fingers—and flinches at the sting. The wound feels raw. Wet. 

She groans as she lifts her head, hears the feather-light tinkling of glass when she does. She blinks out over the warped dashboard, through the spider-webbed cracks of the caved-in windshield. The headlights are still on, casting a gauzy, yellow sheen through the haze of smoke and darkness, illuminating the tree that’s nearly split the hood of the car in half.

She cranes her neck towards the driver’s seat next, where the door has been left ajar, wide open to the night. The seat’s empty.

“Ben?” Her voice comes out cracked, but all she hears is the hiss of smoke sputtering from under the hood. The hum of cicadas. Crickets. Night things.

She calls for him again—yelling, this time—and tries to ignore the tendrils of anxiety coiling in her belly, crawling up her esophagus. Saliva pools in her mouth that she desperately swallows back down. She feels like she’s going to vomit.

Did Ben get ejected from the car? Is he hurt? Did he leave her?

It’s painstaking, the effort of moving—her whole body _aches_—but she manages to unbuckle her seatbelt. Her door is caved in, and there’s a tree so close she could reach through the broken glass and run her fingers over the wet bark, feel its calloused ridges, tenderly press her fingers into all it crevices and lines.

She peels herself out of her seat with excruciating effort, crawling over the center console, tasting more copper in her mouth while the interior of the car begins to tremble and blur around the edges of her vision. She’s so tired, and it’s hard to keep her eyes open despite the adrenaline surging through her. She’s forced to give up halfway, too exhausted to continue, slumping over the console.

“Ben?” she cries.

What if she can’t get out of the car? What if no one ever finds her? What if she dies out here?

Like an answered prayer, Ben appears only moments later, startling her as his presence fills up the opened door, his head ducked low, tucked just beneath the roof of the car so he can see her. She’s never felt so relieved to see another person. Her eyes fill with tears.

“Taylor,” he breathes. “_Fuck_.” He looks frightened, his eyes sliding all over her, taking quick inventory of her injuries.

“Help me,” she whines. Her anxiety is tangible now, pulsing in time with her thudding heartbeat.

“Just—hold on, okay? I got you.” He ducks into the car, dipping a knee down onto the seat so he can reach across for her. He fits his arms beneath the crook of her armpits, pulling her forward, and she cries out at the sudden, tearing pain in her right wrist, a shockwave that shoots all the way up to her shoulder.

“Wait—wait!” she gasps.

Ben stops, brows pulling together, looking down at her arm like it’s infected, like it’s full of poison.

“Jesus. Might be broken,” he says, panting. He tosses his head to shake the hair out of his eyes, damp with sweat. He has a cut above his upper lip and on his cheek, and she notices a swelling robin’s egg above his brow bone that’ll definitely bruise. The airbags didn’t deploy. He must’ve hit his head on the steering wheel. “We should wait,” Ben says. “I called an ambulance.” 

Her head jerks up, and fear cuts so sharply through her it’s like being sliced open with a hot knife. For a moment, all she can do is gape. She feels as though the wind has been knocked out of her.

“What?” she finally manages, breathless. “No… no, no, _no_. I can’t go to the hospital—"

“Why not?”

_Because Mr. J will kill me_, she thinks.

Her eyes dart back and forth between his, desperate. Searching.

“Because I don’t have insurance,” she blurts. “They’ll want to take my blood and do tests—and I can’t. I _can’t_.” She breaks down into sobs, still halfway draped over the center console, the hard plastic digging into her ribs, making it almost impossible for her lungs to fully expand.

“Just—stop, okay?” He shifts closer, dips his head low to get her attention, capturing her eyes. “It’s gonna be fine. I can chip in—I’ll, like, pay for all of it if I have to.” He sounds just as afraid as she does, and it isn’t exactly comforting. “It’s my fault, okay?” He pauses, takes a shuddering breath as he bows his head, and then turns his attention towards the darkness of the backseat, tunnel-vision taking over. “Fuck, this is all my fault. Fuck!” 

The intensity of his anger startles her, but she shakes her head at him, trying to get his attention again, tears sliding down her cheeks as she pushes up on her uninjured arm to take some of the pressure off her ribs.

“Ben, _please_, you have to call them back. Tell them not to come.” She swallows to urge more moisture back into her mouth. She knows she sounds harried. Frantic. “You don’t understand, I have to go home, I have—”

Even as she says it, the wailing cry of approaching sirens is unmistakable, and her entire body seems to deflate, shriveling in on itself. There’s no stopping it now.

Everything happens so fast, after. Two paramedics manage to pull her out of the car, put her on one of those hard boards and then make her lay flat in case she has a spinal injury. She keeps trying to sit up, trying to find Ben in all the chaos, the noise. There’s a firetruck and a police car, and she hates them both, has hated them since she was a child. The flashing lights and the ear-splitting cry of sirens, the way her heart always clenches in fear, lodging high in her throat when she hears or sees one approach, stealing her breath.

They always take her away from Mr. J, and this time is no different, only, Mr. J isn’t here to watch. This time, there isn’t snow on the ground flecked with blood. There’s no Batman. No city on fire.

She jolts when a mask comes down over her nose and mouth, her eyes wild, darting. One of the EMTs—dark-skinned, with thick, heavy dreadlocks that she has secured in a low ponytail—lays a hand on her shoulder and pushes her back down, trying to calm her.

“It’s just oxygen, okay? Breathe.”

She tries. She really tries. But as they load her into the back of the ambulance after strapping down her legs and chest, her panic comes back full force, and all she can think about is Mr. J, how much of a mistake this was, how _angry_ he’s going to be when he finds out. She cranes her neck, looking for Ben, and spots him talking to a police officer while another circles the scene, shining a flashlight into the dark cavern of the car. Ben easily dwarfs the one officer in height, and Ben’s arms are folded across his chest, head bowed low, like he’s embarrassed. Ashamed.

The wreckage of the car behind him looks too grotesque to be real, jutting out from the forest of trees like an empty coffin that’s been crudely unearthed. It looks staged, like something out of a movie.

“Ben!” She tries in vain to get his attention. “Ben!”

“Try to keep still, honey,” the EMT says. She’s wrapping a blood pressure cuff around her good arm, and then there’s the _krssssh_ of Velcro as the EMT undoes the cuff and opts for a smaller size instead.

The doors are starting to close. Taylor feels like her heart is going to lurch straight out of her chest. She rips the oxygen mask off and sits up.

“Wait, wait! Isn’t he going to come?”

“We’ll let him know where you’re headed, okay? Come on, lay your head back for me, that’s it….” She guides Taylor’s head back down to the stretcher, and Taylor’s eyes flutter, burning with more unshed tears as she stares up at the ambulance ceiling, the lights too bright, everything too much, her right arm cradled uselessly over her abdomen, lit up with pain. The sound of movement, doors slamming, shoes scraping over the hard floor, the static of walkie-talkies, the glow of red and blue lights swimming in her peripheral. Voices. Too many voices. 

It’s too much like before. When she was a child. When they dragged her kicking and screaming into the back of a police car. Slammed the doors on her, restrained her even as she screamed for them to stop. Talked to her in soothing voices, trying to get her to calm down when all she wanted was Mr. J.

“Bump that up to three liters, will you? And get some pressure on that head wound.” The EMT is talking to someone on Taylor’s other side. It’s really hard to breathe.

“I—I have to go—go home,” she manages to wheeze out in between gasps for air. Her breath fogs up the inside of the oxygen mask. She feels dizzy. “Please let me go home.”

“Just lie back. Breathe. We’re going to take care of you.” Then, to the other EMT as she’s ripping her stethoscope out of her ears, “Eighty-two over fifty. Get me an eighteen gauge.”

Taylor shakes her head, but it only makes the throbbing in her skull worse, and her vision starts to blur. Hard to see straight, prickly black dots fuzzing in and out of her vision.

_Everything will be okay_. She remembers them saying that to her from before, feeding her that bold-faced lie, over and over again, almost as if saying it more for their own benefit than for hers. But everything _wasn’t _okay. They made her forget him. Years of child psychotherapy, psychologists, speech therapists, counseling, specialists, all of it. Putting her in the foster system—no explanation as to the whereabouts of her parents—shuffling her from home to home like a naughty pet, like a dog that hadn’t been properly house-trained. She was the kind of animal that frothed at the mouth when provoked, the kind that got kicked in the haunches until they went down, until they were properly subdued. The kind that needed occasional leashing in the dank underbelly of someone’s basement when they lashed out or misbehaved. She got fed the rotten scraps. She curled up on old newspaper. She pissed in concrete corners. She trembled and tucked her tail between her legs, tried to make herself small. Palatable. 

The truth hurt almost more than everything else—the truth that no one wanted her, no one could _handle_ her—a burden she had been forced to shoulder for her entire life.

That is, until Mr. J.

_He_ was the one to finally lift that weight from her. She remembers it with startling clarity, that frozen night on New Year’s Eve, the pulse of the whole city thrumming to the same beat, her breath visible in the air, the feel of Mr. J’s hand curling around her upper arm, the shock of being pulled back against the railing of the bridge, and then dragged over it, onto the safety of the other side. Taking the knife from him, the crackle of fireworks splitting the black sky. And then again, several months later, when he’d bent her over the couch, burned his name into her skin, laying claim to her in an irreversible way. Making it impossible to look at herself naked and not think of him, that secret thrill.

_Mine, now. _

It felt _good_ to be wanted like that, to be wanted with an intensity that felt feral—untamed—like he’d do anything for her. He’d drain the ocean and lasso the moon. Pocket the sun and milk the stars, sprinkle the glittery remains over her so that she could bathe in lucent stardust. Nothing was too much. 

And although he had stripped her of choice like so many before him, he’d given her something else instead—the ecstasy of knowing what it felt like to finally be wanted.

She belonged to him, and he belonged to her. That was their only truth. 

She remembers—after the branding—how she’d felt so light, for the first time in her whole life. She felt like she could stand up a little straighter, felt like she could breathe without the threat of her lungs caving in. Mr. J wanted her. He wasn’t going to abandon her like all the rest. He was different.

Now, though, everything was on the precipice of crumbling apart. Would they find out the truth of her and him—_the Joker_? Would they succeed in ripping her away from him again, and if they did, could she survive their separation? How long would it take for him to find his way back to her again?

Still hard to breathe. Something squeezes the flesh of her upper arm, too tight—a tourniquet—and the cacophony of sirens rings in her ears. The ambulance is moving now. She tries to reach over with her right arm to rip the tourniquet off, but the EMT on her other side urges her to keep still.

She frowns at them. “What are you—_stop_,” she pants.

She watches the EMT’s mouth move in reply as the woman hovers over her, but her features blur into something shapeless, and no sound emerges. The ambulance falls away suddenly, dissolving into thin air, revealing in its place a broad canvas of pitch-black sky, gauzy from the swirls of smoke suspended above her. Falling snow, ice cold as it slants across her cheeks, her eyelashes. She’s shivering so hard her bones rattle. She can no longer feel her fingers. Her toes. Mr. J is in the back of the police car, staring at her through the window as she screams for him and beats on it with her fists. He’s laughing at her, blood in his teeth, like he just took a bite out of something raw, but all she can hear is the ringing in her ears from the force of the explosion. Hands close around her shoulders, her arm, ripping her away from him, and all she can is scream, _save me, Mr. J, save me! _

The ambulance bursts back into existence, like someone snapped their fingers and made it so, but she can’t hear anything except for her own thudding heart and Mr. J’s low, gravelly voice in her ear. It’s just a whisper, something meant only for the two of them, but she hears it as clearly as if he were crouched right behind her. She can almost imagine the feel of his hot breath wafting over her ear.

_I’m the only one who can save you now._

* * *

She wakes in the emergency room.

The lights are too bright again, and she groans, flinching away from it. Someone is lifting up her shirt, pressing something cold and sticky against her skin. She feels goose bumps light up over her arms and legs. It’s cold in here.

Her eyes flutter open enough to see a nurse leaning over her.

“Hey,” the woman says, offering a kind smile. She’s young—tall—her brown hair pulled up into a nice ponytail. She has straight, shiny hair. Like Logan’s. Her gloved hands move quickly over Taylor’s chest and stomach as she presses stickers with metal nubs on them onto her skin. “Just replacing your leads for the heart monitor, okay?” She works fast, attaching a series of gray wires to the stickers she just placed. “Do you know where you are right now? How are you feeling?”

Taylor frowns, dazed, her eyes sweeping over her surroundings. A pale, sterile room with walls the color of eggshells, the mint green curtain drawn closed to provide a semblance of privacy. A countertop housing a computer and some cabinets.

“What happened to my arm?” she croaks, without even looking at it. It feels so _heavy_. “Where’s Ben?” She opens and clothes her mouth a couple of times; it feels cottony, like the way it does after Novocain has worn off.

“Is Ben your dad?” the nurse asks. “We’ve been trying to get in contact with your parents. Do you have a number we can use to reach them?

Taylor shakes her head, and her vision fuzzes a little when she does. There’s a weird probe on her pointer finger and an IV in the crook of her arm. She traces the tubing with her eyes, sees the IV pump, the metal pole, the bag of fluids. The steady _drip, drip, drip_ of the fluids in the little cylindrical tube. When she glances towards her right arm, the bulky, blue cast sends her heart clear up into her esophagus, stealing the breath from her.

_Oh no_.

Her memories come flooding back. She squirms and hurries to pull down her shirt before the nurse can finish, hyperaware of the situation now. She can’t let her see the brand. Too many questions. Too many red flags. And even if she lies, somehow they’ll _know _it was from Mr. J, and then the cat will be out of the bag, and nothing will ever be the same.

The nurse pulls back. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” she says. She offers a gentle, reassuring smile.

Taylor swallows and shakes her head again, but this time the movement sends a jolt of sharp, throbbing pain shooting towards her temple. “I—I have to go home,” she mumbles. She tries sitting up, but there’s wires and cords and lines tangled all over her, a blood pressure cuff secured around her upper arm. She irritably tries to bat everything out of the way, her heart racing as she slides the weird probe off her finger. Her voice is slurred—they must have given her something. She lifts up the arm with the cast. “What is this?” 

The nurse frowns, stepping in to assist. The badge clipped to the ‘V’ of her scrubs dangles in front of Taylor’s face when she leans over her to undo the blood pressure cuff. Tessa M., RN, BSN. 

“Hey,” she says, gently, “take it easy. It’s okay.” She untangles some of the cords so Taylor doesn’t feel quite as claustrophobic. “You have a displaced fracture in your wrist. Dr. Wyle said you were lucky it didn’t require any surgery. I gave you a little bit of medicine to help take the edge off. How does your arm feel?”

“Hurts,” she mumbles, but the pain’s definitely not as sharp as it was before. It mostly just feels numb now, like the weird, fuzzy weight of a phantom limb.

She barely remembers them drawing her blood and taking an X-ray, the young doctor who came in to fit her arm in the cast after the scan was done. It all feels like a faraway dream now. The medicine must’ve made her really sleepy. How long has she been out for?

“Your blood pressure looks a lot better now. I put some antibiotic ointment and some gauze on that head wound,” the nurse is saying. She presses a few buttons on the IV pump. “You have a concussion, so you should definitely try to take it easy over the next few days. Dr. Wyle will write you a prescription for the ointment in the morning, most likely, but we really need to talk to your parents.” She goes over to the counter to reach for her clipboard. Fishes a pen out of her scrub pocket. “Do you know their phone number?” 

Taylor’s heartbeat pulses in time with the throbbing in her head. The blood rush sends a wave of nausea through her, the room tilting on its side for a moment before it rights itself.

“I’m sorry—tomorrow?” She can’t help the tremble in her voice. She glances up at the clock mounted on the wall next to the cabinets, squinting at it. It’s almost two AM.

“The doctor wants to keep you overnight, since you were so hypotensive when you came in and lost quite a bit of blood. We’ll recheck your hemoglobin in the morning.”

Hemo—_what_? She shakes her head, and then winces. She really needs to stop doing that. “No, no,” she says, “I can’t stay. I have to get home. My—my uncle will be worried—” 

The nurse’s brows pull together in concern. “Do you have his number? I’ll call him for you, let him know you’re alright.”

“I—I don’t know it off the top of my head.”

That part, at least, is true. She realizes suddenly that she doesn’t know where her cell phone is. Her bag with all of her stuff was probably still in Ben’s car. Would he bring it to her? Where _was_ he? Why didn’t he come in the ambulance with her?

“Taylor?”

Taylor blinks her attention back to the nurse. 

“Do you know of anyone who might be able to give us the contact information for your uncle? What’s his name?”

All Taylor can do is try not to cry, even as she feels the tears welling up in her eyes. She squeezes her eyes shut and wills them away. What is she supposed to say?

“I’m sorry,” she mumbles, “I just need to talk to Ben.”

The nurse studies her closely for what feels like a long time, and Taylor swallows back her panic. She feels bad for the woman—she’s just trying to do her job—but this is so much bigger than her, than both of them.

“Taylor—” the nurse begins, but then another nurse is poking her head around the curtain, nodding towards something on the other side.

Taylor’s eyes slide down to the floor, where the curtain stops to reveal a pair of men’s boots. Black jeans.

Her heart leaps into her throat, and she’s not sure if it’s out of fear or relief. She knows it can’t be Mr. J—there’s no way he could go unrecognized in a place like this. But she also knows it’s not Ben. He was wearing something different earlier—and she’s never seen him wear boots like that. Did he go home and change?

“I’ll be right back,” the nurse says. Taylor watches her disappear behind the curtain, but not before pulling the sliding glass door shut on the other side so that Taylor can’t eavesdrop.

Another pair of legs joint he first, this one dressed in scrub, but a different color than the nurse’s. A doctor, maybe?

She watches under the curtain for what feels like ages. Her heart slams so hard and fast against her ribcage that it makes her chest ache. There’s a laceration slit across her collarbone and neck where the seatbelt had sliced into her skin, and it stings every time she bends her neck, or when her shirt brushes up against it. She watches the footsteps disappear for a while, wringing her hands while she impatiently waits for Tessa to return.

Finally, the boots are back, and the sliding glass door opens.

“Sir, we really recommend her staying—”

“Let me see her.”

Taylor’s heart skips a beat. She knows that voice. Where does she know that voice?

The curtain is peeled back, the rings skirting against the rod with a metallic whine, and her eyes widen.

Ressling.

She forces her gaping mouth shut, but she knows her eyes are still wide. How did he find her? How could he have possibly found her? 

The nurse clears her throat. She looks flustered. “Is this your uncle?” she asks.

Taylor swallows. Looks at Ressling. She understands that she’s supposed to say yes, so she nods twice—quickly.

The nurse almost seems disappointed by this, or maybe she’s just doubtful.

“Right,” she says, gathering her bearings. She turns towards Ressling. “You’ll have to sign the forms I mentioned earlier, sir.”

Ressling gives a barely perceptible nod. He’s all stiff and on edge—but Ressling’s always been a little stoic, a little too serious. He is a tightly wound coil in comparison to Mr. J, who sprung loose from his jack-in-the-box a long time ago.

The nurse’s eyes dart between Taylor and Ressling for a moment, and then she mumbles something about being right back, the glass door sliding closed behind her. The room is submerged in silence. 

The last time she’d seen Ressling was when he’d picked her up from the mall that night that it had rained so hard, when her bus pass had expired. She can count on the fingers of one hand the amount of times she’s been alone with him, and each time is somehow more unnerving than the last. The way he’s looking at her now makes her want to shrivel in on herself, like a withering flower that’s been deprived too long of sunlight and water. 

She watches him approach, his eyes sliding up and down and back up again. She pulls the blanket a little higher around her waist. She doesn’t like him looking at her.

“Are you hurt?”

He smells like cigarette smoke and something woodsy, and his leather jacket is wet. His all-black ensemble is a stark contrast to the pale interior of the room, his presence like a black cloud. He’s grown out his hair some since the last time she’d seen him, not shaved so close to his head anymore, but he still looks as hard and angry as she remembers. Penetrating, dark eyes. Mouth thinned in a straight line. Sharp cheekbones underneath a thin layer of dark stubble.

She watches a bead of water slide down the arm of his jacket, disappearing around the curve of his elbow. She swallows thickly.

“The nurse said I had a concussion.”

“I know what the nurse said,” he says, gruffly. “Are you _hurt_?” he asks again.

She shakes her head ‘no’—slowly—and then tries not to squirm when he steps closer, standing over her now, assessing the bandage on her skull, where it seems to awaken, throbbing hotly under his scrutiny.

“How did you find me here?”

It should be concerning, the fact that he tracked her down so quickly—Does Mr. J know about Ben? Was the car accident on the news?—but mostly she feels relieved. He’s going to get her out of here. Take her back to Mr. J. That’s what he does.

Ressling doesn’t answer. He steps away to retrieve his phone from the inside of his jacket, and she watches as his thumbs move across the screen.

Is he texting Mr. J? Is he letting him know that she’s okay?

She swallows. Her mouth is so dry, she just wants something to drink. 

A beat of silence passes—too heavy from the weight of her unanswered question—and she swallows again, this time to push down her burgeoning panic. She ducks her head a little, looking at Ressling from beneath the fan of her eyelashes. 

“Is he mad?” she asks, barely a whisper. She has to know. She has to know what she’s about to walk into.

Ressling pockets his phone. Heaves a sigh. His gaze sweep over the room, looking everywhere but at her, but eventually their eyes do meet, locking onto each other. She watches a muscle twitch along his jaw, like maybe he’s biting back what he really wants to say.

“What do you think?”

His reply is all the confirmation she needs.

When the nurse comes back, she tells Ressling the paperwork is out at the desk for him to sign and that someone can help him with it if he has any questions. He frowns at this, looking between the two of them suspiciously, as if they’re plotting something, but eventually steps out without another word. 

Taylor watches the nurse retrieve some gauze and a Band-Aid from the cabinet on the other side of the room, and then she crouches on her haunches on the side of the bed next to Taylor, gently stripping the transparent tape off her arm so she can pull out the IV.

“Listen…” she says. Taylor can tell she’s nervous, or maybe just unsure. “If you’re not safe, or you don’t feel comfortable going with your uncle, you know you can tell me, right? I won’t let anything bad happen to you. I promise.”

Taylor’s face heats up despite her best efforts to remain unaffected, and she feels embarrassed, although she can’t pinpoint exactly why. Maybe it’s the sudden realization that she’s more transparent than she thought. She wears her anxiety openly, like a second skin. It’s her outermost shell, porous and soft, tethered so closely to fear there is no separating them, not without deliberate, painstaking effort, like trying to peel apart the white, stringy membrane from an orange slice without bursting the juice inside.

Is that all people see when they look at her? Just this frightened little girl too afraid to fight back, to stand up for herself? A little girl who needs to be sheltered from the world; is that why everyone is always so hungry to offer false assurances they can’t keep? She’s been at the mercy of the foster care system long enough to know: everyone makes promises, and no one ever keeps them.

“Taylor, does he hurt you?” the nurse’s voice draws her back.

“No,” she says, putting extra effort into making eye contact, wanting to sound convincing. Believable.

The nurse pats her arm, looking sad, but nods ‘OK’, and finishes taking out the IV.

She doesn’t understand how she’s able to leave with Ressling. He must’ve had to show proof that he was her legal guardian somehow, right? It’s frightening to think of all the strings Mr. J must’ve pulled—maybe a long time ago, like in the months immediately after Nathan, that time she doesn’t remember very well. Had he designated Ressling as her legal guardian in case of situations like this? Is that why Mr. J kept him around?

Outside, afterwards, the rain has started back up again. Steam rises from the wet asphalt, the pavement shimmery and black, winking under the street lamps that line the edge of the parking lot where the car is waiting. When he opens the passenger door for her, she’s too exhausted to tell him she can do it herself. She slides into the cool, dark interior, already at ease with the rain gently pattering against the windshield. She just wants to go to sleep. The velour seats feel nice and soft underneath her bare thighs. She’s still wearing her uniform from work, a white short-sleeved polo tucked into a black pleated skirt. Very schoolgirl—minus the plaid—now that she thinks about it.

She slumps into her seat and smooths out the pleats in her skirt, goose bumps pimple up and down her legs. She fights back a yawn as Ressling gets in.

“Get buckled,” he says.

“Why do you care?” she mumbles. There’s no bite to it, but it still sounds childish to her own ears after the words leave her mouth. What is she, eight?

Ressling starts the car. He’s in no mood for games.

“Do what I said,” he snaps.

Taylor rolls her eyes and clicks her seatbelt into place. She rests her casted arm across her abdomen and lays her head back against the headrest, turning away from him, towards the window. It’s strange being back in a car after what happened. She sees a flash of mangled dashboard, the cracked windshield, and she forces herself to blink the memory away.

For a while it’s just the sound of the rain pattering against the roof of the car and the rubber slide of the windshield wipers, the occasional, rhythmic clicking of the turn signal, like a metronome. Ressling checks his phone once or twice—she can see the reflection of it in her window—but she mostly keeps her eyes closed and lets the drive lull into a state of half-sleep.

She blinks herself awake when the car comes to a stop. Goose bumps are quick to prickle over her arms and legs as she stares up at the house. All the lights are off. The blinds closed. It doesn’t even look like anyone is home, but she knows better. He’s there. Waiting for her.

Ressling startles her when the car turns off. The keys jangle as he pulls the keys from the ignition and tucks them inside his jacket. 

“What are you doing?” she asks, a little panicked. He’s never come inside before. Why is he coming inside?

He ignores her, opening his door and stepping out. Taylor’s heart races when his door slams shut, leaving her in the dark silence for only a few precious, heart-pounding seconds before he swings open her door.

She slips out onto the wet pavement and stares at him, trying to figure out what’s going on as he slams her door shut. The sound seems to echo throughout the quiet of the neighborhood like the reverberation of a gunshot, and it lights up her nerves, making her heart throb.

He doesn’t look at her, but he waits for her to lead the way to the house, which she does, even as she desperately wracks her brain for a way to delay the inevitable. She feels like a newborn colt as her knees knock together. She’s already shaking so bad.

On the small, concrete porch, she spins around to face Ressling, who is closer behind her than she thought. “I don’t have my keys,” she says, stupidly.

He gestures her forward with a nod of his head. “It’s open.”

Right. She swallows as she reaches forward, turns the knob.

It’s dark inside, and she has to take a moment to allow her eyes to adjust. She nearly jumps out of her skin when Ressling gently ushers her forward, hand at the small of her back. The door clicks shut behind them. She stumbles a few steps into the kitchen, her wet shoes squeaking against the tile in a way that cuts so sharply through the silence that it makes her flinch.

It’s warm, heady inside—almost humid—and she can tell that the two windows in the living room are open even though the blinds are drawn. Mr. J must’ve left them open all day. The rain’s picking up, too, growing heavier, and her spine goes rigid at the low roll of thunder that rumbles in the distance.

She doesn’t know what to do. What to say. It’s weird having Ressling here, inside their living space. Only she and Mr. J have ever shared this space, and now he’s invading it. It feels like he’s breaking a holy sacrament just by being here. Like he’s wearing his hat at the dinner table during a prayer, or stepping on a grave instead of around it, or staying seated during the national anthem. Little _no-no’s_ she remembers from her childhood, stuff that always felt like such a big deal.

She feels paralyzed—frozen—with him standing right behind her. She has no idea what she’s walking into, but with the way her heart throbs, she knows it can’t be good.

She finds her voice after too many lingering beats of silence. “Mr. J?” she calls, her voice tentative and soft in the darkness.

She doesn’t have to wait long for him to appear.

His door opens slowly down the hall, the whine of the hinges sending goose bumps flooding over her skin as he emerges, filling up the doorway in a way that makes her breath catch. He’s dressed to the nines. This startles her more than anything else, the fact that he’s in his trademark attire. His greasepaint looks fresh.

“Mr. J,” she says again, voice cracking, choking on the tears lodged in her throat, tears that won’t come. She’s too scared to cry.

She always forgets how big he is. How broad his shoulders are, the unnerving way he keeps them hunched close to his ears. She swallows as he steps into the living room, a thin sliver of yellow light silhouetted behind him from his bedroom. The door whines closed on its own, only halfway shut.

“Come here.”

She shivers at the rumble in his voice, not at all unlike the deep roll of thunder outside.

It’s a herculean effort, the act of moving, but she forces herself forward, step by step, until she crosses the partition that separates the linoleum from the carpet.

She’s still a few paces from him—a relatively safe distance, all things considered—but she doesn’t know if she can make herself go any further than this. She wants to reach out and hold onto the countertop for support, but she resists. The counter’s on her right side anyway, and the most she can manage with that arm is cradling it against her abdomen; it hurts less than allowing it to dangle and having all the blood rush to her hand. 

Mr. J doesn’t move. She’s still acutely aware of Ressling’s presence by the front door, in the kitchen, but she doesn’t dare turn around to look at him.

“Where. Have you. Been?”

He punctuates each word like they all belong in their own separate sentence. It’s unnerving. _Terrifying_. Fear slithers along the curve of her spine. She reaches up with her left arm to cradle her right elbow, her palm resting along the edge of her cast.

“I’m sorry, Mr. J—we were just—I went for a car ride with a—a friend from work, and I was going to come straight home after, I promise I was—”

“I’ve been too _lenient _with you, haven’t I?” he interrupts. Taylor blinks at him, surprised. He’s starting towards her, slow and leisurely, prowling closer until they’re only an arm’s length apart. He leans down, leveling his face with hers. “_Haven’t I_?”

She shakes her head ‘no’, but it’s diminutive, like she’s afraid that too sudden of a movement will jumpstart him into action. She doesn’t know if she can trust herself to speak.

“I _thought _I was doing a nice thing,” he goes on, “upping your allowance, teaching you to drive, letting you, uh, get a _job_….” He’s circling her now, and Taylor’s fear prickles along the back of her neck, all her hairs standing at attention. She’s so wired, she feels like if he were to reach out and touch her, she might spontaneously combust into a firestorm of electrical sparks. “But I can see now that was a mistake. You need to be reigned in.” He’s behind her now. Leaning in close enough for his body heat to bleed all up and down her back, lighting up the nerves along her spine. His mouth brushes her ear. “You need your leash tightened, don’t you?”

She puffs out a shuddery exhale in response, every single muscle pulled taut, aching from the strain of anxious anticipation.

“What do you think?” he murmurs, circling around to her front. He slips a gloved finger beneath her chin, tilting it up until she meets his eyes, dark and glittering. “Is that what you need?”

She’s trembling. She cups her hand tighter around her elbow, almost as if to anchor herself.

“I’m sorry,” she shudders. It all comes out in a hasty rush of air, like she’s been holding her breath this whole time. Her voice is barely a whisper when she speaks. She doesn’t want to antagonize him. “I didn’t mean for—for this. We were just out driving, and—and then, the rain, and the roads were really wet and—it won’t happen again, Mr. J—”

He looks up sharply then, as if remembering that Ressling was still there. He keeps his finger nestled under her chin.

“Better call in tomorrow for our girl,” Mr. J says to him, and her brows pull together in confusion. He wants Ressling to call out of work for her?

She looks at Mr. J imploringly. “But—but I’m not sick,” she whimpers.

His dark, heavy gaze lowers back to her, and the way he grins at her makes her spine curl. It’s all teeth, rotten and sour and full of malice. Furled scar tissue ripples along the sides of his mouth the wider his grin stretches, and it should be grotesque, but for some reason she can’t bring herself to look away. When he steps closer, she stiffens, but then he’s hunching down low, nosing along the line of her jaw, her neck, huffing hot breath all up and down the column of her throat, _smelling _her, like he’s missed her taste.

“When I’m done with you,” his hot breath wafts over her ear, “you will be.”

She shudders audibly, fear cutting so sharply through her it’s as though she’s been split in half. She knows immediately that whatever he has planned, it’s not something she’ll escape from unscathed. It’s not something she’ll escape from at all.

She shakes her head at him. Tears are flowing freely now, blurring up her vision, streaking down her cheeks. 

“Please, _please_ forgive me….”

His mouth curls into a dangerous smirk. “You don’t want to be_ forgiven_,” he sneers. His fingers bite deeper into her flesh, curling around her chin so he can yank her closer. “You want to be _punished_.”

She shakes her head at him, breaking free of his hold, but his gaze is focused somewhere behind her, and when she stumbles backwards to put some distance between them, her back collides into something solid. Something warm.

She spins around to face Ressling, _terrified_, but he doesn’t touch her, just looks at her with an expression that is as dark and unreadable as ever, and it’s Mr. J who reaches for her first. He wraps a forearm around her waist and hauls her deeper into the darkness of the living room, away from the yellowing light that spills out into the hallway.

She tastes the frantic pulsing of her heart, snagged somewhere high and tight in the column of her throat, blocking her airway.

“Wait—stop!” She doesn’t know what’s happening. “What—what are you doing?” she pants. 

Her question is met with a boom of thunder, and she exhales sharply when she’s dragged through the living room and shoved face-first into the wall that the TV is butted against. She puts out her arms to brace for the impact, but there’s not enough time to fully outstretch them, and her arms are crossed in the shape of an X when she slams into it. Her right arm takes the brunt of the assault, her cast colliding with the wall with enough force to make her cry out. A lightning rod of pain shoots up her wrist all the way to her shoulder, but even then she doesn’t dare move, not with Mr. J’s big hand nestled between her shoulder blades, holding her in place.

“Mr. J,” she whines, touching her forehead to the wall, trying not to hyperventilate. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

She feels him press himself up against her from behind, caging her against the wall. She tries to swallow down her panic, overwhelmed by the heat of him, and when he leans downs over her, something hard and cold from the inside of his jacket brushes against her upper arm.

“You’re not sorry,” he says, “but you will be.”

He’s gone, suddenly, and Taylor can do nothing but pant against the wall, chest heaving. She’s too scared to crane her neck to look behind her, so she doesn’t. The rain pours down outside, accompanied by a gentle wind that rattles the blinds and makes goose bumps sprout over her arms and legs despite the humidity of the room. A sharp crack of thunder makes her jump against the wall, but even then she doesn’t move, just waits. Waits.

Her ears prickle at the sound of steps behind her, boots on carpet, and then the distinct metal click of a belt being undone, the hiss of leather as it slithers through the loops.

“Y’know…” Mr. J says, somewhere behind her. She can tell he’s turned away from her, talking to Ressling. “I was going to have you _watch_… but let’s make this a little more _fun_, hm?” he says. “How about _you _do the honors.”

Taylor doesn’t understand what’s happening, but Ressling must hesitate too long, and she hears Mr. J shift with impatience. 

“Come, come, don’t keep the lady_ waiting_.”

He sounds excited. She does look behind her then, slowly, glancing between the two men in confusion. Her gaze trails to where Ressling has a belt cradled in his closed fist, like a noose. Her face pales. 

Her eyes dart frantically between the pair of them, where Mr. J stands slightly behind Ressling, off to the side.

“No… _no_,” she says, horrified. She understands what her punishment is now—she just doesn’t understand why Ressling has to be the one to give it to her. She shakes her head at them—both of them—and starts to turn around. “Please don’t do this,” she whimpers.

“Face the wall,” Mr. J growls, voice full of gravel. “Don’t make me tell you again.”

Taylor gapes at him, tears sliding down her cheeks. She can’t believe this is happening. She looks desperately to Ressling, trying to read his expression, but his face is inscrutable. Hard to tell if he’s resigned or angry, his mouth pulled into a thin, tight line, and she can’t see his eyes in the dark. What is he thinking? 

She turns back to the wall and cries. She’s shaking as she bows her forehead to the wall, feels the cool plaster against her skin. She can’t believe this is happening. That he’d do this.

It’s quiet for a long time, and she holds her breath, waiting, her whole body tense and clenched tight for what’s to come. 

“Come on, come on, _come on_,” Mr. J says, full of anticipation.

When the belt finally snaps down over her ass, it feels as though the breath is punched from her lungs. It hurts more than she thought it would. Her mouth opens in a silent cry, and her fingers curl instinctively against the wall, looking for something to hold onto, to brace herself with.

The back of her thighs tense for the next blow, and it comes fast, with as little warning as the first, and she does make a sound this time, something that’s ripped out of her, caught between a gasp and a sob.

She shudders as she waits for the next hit, and this one lands lower, biting along the backs of her bare thighs, leaving a hot stripe that burns.

She grits her teeth and curls her hands into fists, digging her nails into her palms. It’s _humiliating_. Why is Mr. J making him _do_ this? Why does Ressling have to be here at all?

The one after makes her shout, and she pants desperately against the wall, trying and failing to catch her breath. Her face burns with shame, but it’s nothing compared to the hot, stinging welts that are striped across the back of her bare thighs, the skin that her skirt doesn’t cover.

“How many?” she hears Ressling ask, so quiet she has to strain to hear him. 

“Thirty.”

Her heart plummets.

Mr. J answers like he’d already thought about this, and she suddenly finds herself wondering how long he’d been planning this for. She doubts that having Ressling _‘do the honors’_ was as spontaneous as he’d made it sound. He’d _wanted _Ressling to be the one to do this. As if the act wasn’t already humiliating enough for her, Ressling had to be the one to dole out the punishment. Mr. J knew how much she hated him. He _knew_. 

It feels like a long time before the next one comes, and she thinks, _thirty _as it lands, _how am I supposed to make it to thirty?_

She loses track after eleven, and when the next blow comes, a little higher than the last, it catches on her brand, and she bites down so hard on her lower lip she tastes blood in her mouth. It snaps again in the same spot immediately after, and she jumps against the wall, struggles to keep her mouth shut; she doesn’t want to give them the satisfaction of hearing her cry.

As if Mr. J knows, she hears him say, “Harder.”

Ressling does. The belt catches on the underside of her ass, and she _shouts_, her knees buckling against the wall.

“_Don’t_ move,” Mr. J warns, “or I’ll make it _fifty_.”

She swallows and tries to straighten, every muscle in her body pulled taut, too tight.

“Please, please stop,” she gasps.

The anticipation is almost worse than the blows themselves, just waiting for the next one to come, not knowing where exactly it’s going to fall as her heart thunders so hard in her ears, drowning out everything else but the labored sound of her own breathing, the rapid rise and fall of her chest.

She wonders what they’re thinking as they stand there behind her. Is Ressling ashamed? Does he like it? Does Mr. J?

_You know this hurts me more than it hurts you. _

She doesn’t know if that sentiment still rings true anymore. Not after this. She used to think he felt sorry any time he had to punish her, that he didn’t want to—but she realizes suddenly how naïve she’s been to think that. How stupid. Of course he isn’t sorry—he _likes_ it. 

The belt comes down again, and again, and again, and she squeezes her eyes shut and cries, teeth clenched so hard it feels like her jaw will crack.

She’s wrecked when he’s finally done, trembling so hard she can barely stand, her whole body drenched in a cold sweat. She hears the clink of the belt buckle as it clatters to the carpet, and she lets herself cry even harder now that it’s over, even as she struggles to catch her breath, tries to get her muscles to unclench. Her backside is on _fire_. She sucks in a shuddering breath, the welts on the back of her thighs singing with pain, snot dripping down her nose, drool bubbling at her mouth. She thinks he might’ve broken skin, but she can’t tell if it’s sweat or blood that drips over the backs of her thighs, right below her ass. The taste of salt and copper bleeds over her tongue where she’d bit down on her lip, and the wall is wet from her tears where she’d smeared her face against it.

All she thinks is that she feels humiliated, broken in a way she’s never felt before, not even after Nathan. The rape.

This feels different somehow. Nastier.

She thinks, as she stands there and cries, that maybe it’s different because she feels somehow complicit in all of this. She could’ve done more to stop him. She could’ve run. But she didn’t even try—she didn’t even fight it.

Why didn’t she fight it?

“_Very_ good,” Mr. J rumbles. She shivers at the sound of his voice. Only then does she allow herself to crumble to the floor, turning onto her left side, shoulder to the wall as she slides down, down, all the way to the floor, onto her knees. It hurts to sit like this, her ass nestled on the back of her calves, but the effort of standing is exhausting, and she can’t do it any longer. 

She bows her head, pitifully cradles her broken arm against her abdomen and shudders through her broken sobs. She’s glad for the curtain her hair provides. She hates that Ressling has to see her like this, that he made her like this. She doesn’t look up even when she feels the weight of Mr. J’s shadow hovering in her peripheral, standing directly over her.

“What do we say?”

She swallows down the saliva pooling in her mouth. She feels like she’s going to be sick. The medicine they’d given her at the hospital has definitely worn off by now.

She cranes her neck to look up at him through a hot blur of tears. “What?” she croaks.

Mr. J crouches next to her. There’s sweat beading along his brow, and his eyes are fire bright. She flinches when he takes her chin in his hand—gentle, this time—and directs her gaze towards Ressling.

“I said… what do we _say_?”

Her jaw slackens. She’s disgusted he would ask this of her. But she makes herself look up at the man who’d just turned her ass beet red, belted her until she’d sobbed for mercy, brought her to her knees, and she wipes the snot from her nose with the back of her forearm and says, “_Thank you_,” and then her eyes blur with tears again and she has to look away.

Mr. J hoots with laughter—that shrill, breathless laughter she _hates_—and then hunches down close to cup her face in his hands, brushing her tears away with his thumbs, cooing at her.

“_There’s_ my good girl.”

It’s condescending. She knows that. She sinks her teeth into her bloodied lip, making it bleed again, and Mr. J wipes that away, too.

And in that moment, kneeling there with him as he murmurs to her what a good job she did, what a _good _girl she is, she feels something in her chest clench, some heart valve that’s clamped itself shut and won’t open back up, and she thinks, _I almost hate you_.

Almost. 

* * *

Afterwards, she sleeps for almost fourteen hours. It’s nearly dark when she wakes, her room warm and the air a little stale. The last tendrils of daylight slither away as blue-grey dusk pools in through the half-open blinds. She hears the hum of the city outside, the rumble of cars from a nearby exit ramp. The sounds are comforting. Familiar. They ground her in a way nothing else ever will, a reminder that Gotham is carrying on as it should, as it always does, shouldering its countless burdens, the secrets that sluice through its crevices deep at night. Gotham reminds her that time stops for no one, least of all little orphan girls that have been forgotten about. Abandoned.

She lies in bed for a long time—she’d slept on her belly, more comfortable, that way—and stares at the long, simmering shadows that ripple across her closet door. Shadows that glide over the furniture, the carpet. It’s pretty. Relaxing. Kind of like being underwater at the bottom of the pool with your eyes open, neck craned back, looking up at the sky through the gentle swell of the water’s surface. The way the world on the other side seems to undulate, everything slightly out of focus and hazy. The way sound is dulled and kind of faraway. And then that moment you catch yourself wondering what it’d be like to never resurface, daring yourself to hold your breath for as long as you can. The sick thrill of wondering what it feels like to drown. 

She peels back her covers. The urgency of her bladder is too painful to ignore, and she cries as she gets out of bed. Everything hurts.

Mr. J’s bedroom door is open, and the house is quiet. Not home then. She’s relieved for the privacy. She doesn’t want to see him right now. Doesn’t think she could face him. Doesn’t know what she would say.

She hobbles to the bathroom. Closes the door. Lowering herself over the toilet is excruciating, and the porcelain is ice cold against all the parts of her that are on fire.

She wraps her cast in saran wrap and a plastic grocery bag when she’s done, stepping into the shower. She keeps the water tepid, shying away from the spray at first because when it pelts her ass and the back of her thighs it _stings_. It’s hard to wash her hair with one hand, but she does her best, lamenting the fact that it’s her dominant arm that has been rendered unusable.

She wipes her face off with her towel when she gets out, and as she goes to wrap it around herself, she catches sight of her reflection in the mirror. She turns— tentatively, almost as if afraid of what she’ll discover—and gazes at herself from over her shoulder. It’s hard not to flinch as her eyes roam over the extent of the damage. It’s like looking at a nebula, a starburst of busted blood vessels, her ass and thighs mottled with bruises, stripes of purple and blue. Her face floods hot with the shame of memory, and she swallows. It looks ugly.

It’s going to be impossible to sit for _weeks_.

She’s never going to be able to look Ressling in the eye again, either. And Mr. J, letting him _do _that to her. _How could he_? she thinks, for what feels like the hundredth time. The rancid aftertaste of betrayal pools in her mouth, a wet, sour coat for the bed of her tongue, and she struggles with what to do with it: does she spit it out or just keep swallowing it down, like she always has?

She thinks about the way it felt to have the two of them standing there behind her while Ressling had whipped her, the _vicious_ bite of Mr. J’s belt on her ass and thighs. Her face soaked with tears, the way she’d begged for them to stop, her face hot with humiliation and the burn of her own tears. Being brought to her knees in utter exhaustion, and then being made to say _thank you _afterwards, like she’d asked for it. Like she’d _wanted _it. 

And she thinks about Mr. J drugging her, months’ worth of violent mood swings, the constant need for naps, the frequency with which she was plagued with nightmares. Did he have the power to control, those, too? Did he plant her nightmares like seeds, knowing they’d sprout into something terrible, something frightening, knowing that she’d come crawling for the solace and comfort that only another person’s presence could provide? That only_ he_ could provide?

And she thinks about the way Logan had looked that one afternoon in history class, so pale and afraid when she’d said, “_my brother goes to GSU_,” while the university burned right there in front of their eyes on the TV. The flames had looked so hot and the smoke so black Taylor could practically taste them, could feel the blister of flames licking their way up the interior lining of her throat, the smoke flooding her lungs, scorching her from the inside out. That fat knot of terror that’d wound itself around her intestines, tangling around her diaphragm. Hard to breathe. Hard to do anything but stand there and gape like an open-mouthed bass.

And she thinks about the aftermath of the school dance, hundreds of dead classmates and a handful of teachers, the memorial service she’d been forced to attend at school, the guilt that had sloshed around in her belly while she’d listened to the names of the dead solemnly murmured into the microphone. Leaving the ceremony halfway through, bursting through the auditorium doors like she was coming up for air after being wrestled underwater. Sobbing in the handicap stall afterwards in the empty bathroom upstairs—the same bathroom she’d gotten ready in for the dance—digging her fingernails into her scalp until the pain was sobering enough to reroute her. Pacing back and forth in that small cubicle, thinking, _it’s all my fault, it’s all my fault, it’s all my fault_. Survivor’s guilt, but also the guilt of responsibility, for not seeing the bigger picture until it was too late, for not begging Mr. J to put a stop to the wheels she should’ve known were in motion. Shouldering the dead weight of this unspeakable burden that no one but her could possibly understand. Had she allowed it to happen? Had she _made_ it happen? Maybe if she hadn’t gotten to the dance, he wouldn’t have targeted her school.

She feels angry all over again, an anger that bubbles and froths in a place so deep inside her that’s it never been touched before—not even Nathan was capable, not even the promise of revenge against him could incite the rage she feels right now.

She has to see Ben.

She doesn’t even know if he’s alright, or what happened to him after the night of the car accident. She doesn’t know why he hadn’t come to see her at the hospital.

They hadn’t exchanged phone numbers prior to the accident, so she has no way of getting in contact with him—not like she has her phone, anyway. She thinks about tracking down a pay phone and calling the diner, asking for his number there, but she’s afraid of getting him in trouble, or maybe incriminating him somehow. She doesn’t know if anybody at work knows about the car accident yet. Ben might not want people to know that he hurt her.

She stares at the glowing green numbers on her nightstand. It’s almost midnight by the time she crawls back into bed. She’d stood barefoot in the kitchen for a long time, hip cocked against the counter while she’d devoured an entire sleeve of stale Saltines, and then chased down the salt with lukewarm water from the tap. Now she stares wide-eyed in the darkness, her skull throbbing from where it’d been slammed against the window. Her arm itches inside its cast.

It’s almost six AM when she jerks out of a feverish, dream-fueled sleep. She frowns into her pillow at the sound of a cabinet door slamming shut in the kitchen. It feels like she’s only been asleep for five minutes.

It’s pale outside. Light that is gray-blue pushes itself past the cracks in her closed blinds. The morning traffic is a little quieter than usual. Saturday. Everyone still in bed, no work to rush off to. She wonders where Mr. J was all night, what sort of things he was doing. What he’s thinking about right now.

She smells him before she sees him, gasoline and sweat wafting into her bedroom before he’s barely even opened her door. The stench clings to him like a noxious cloud, filling up her nostrils as he rounds to the other side of the bed. She keeps her eyes shut, feigning sleep, trying to make the rise and fall of her chest look natural. Even.

His footsteps are heavy as he approaches—he must be tired, to be so carelessly loud—and for a long time, he just stands over her, completely still. Her chest tightens in fear the longer the seconds drag, but she keeps her breathing nice and steady where she lays on her left side, her casted arm draped near her head, next to her pillow.

She keeps her ears perked, too, trying to discern any movement, any sign of what he could be doing, but he’s just standing there. _Staring_.

It should make her uneasy. But it’s been so long since she last slid into bed with him, and she… she’s _missed_ this, the silent comfort of his presence when there’s no pretenses to adhere to. When she can be vulnerable around him without the fear of consequence.

He stands there so long she almost forgets he’s there at all, and she finds herself drifting back to sleep for real. She almost thinks she’s dreaming when she hears him finally shift, crouching down low over her, heat rippling off him in waves. And then two gloved fingers, feather-light, sliding across her slightly-parted mouth, following the curve at the corner of her lips and smoothing up. His fingers skirt across the skin of her cheek, all the way up to her ear.

Half of a Glasgow.

She doesn’t have to wonder what he’s thinking about after that. She already knows.

* * *

Ressling does call out of her work for her—indefinitely, as she finds out. She catches the bus to the diner late in the day, when she’s finally mustered up the courage to leave the house. Mr. J’s been gone for hours, and the longer she waits for him, the longer her anxiety pulses inside her like an electric current, her wires unearthed and exposed—frayed—and she feels like she should be walking around with a sign that warns ‘HIGH VOLTAGE’.

She can’t think about the repercussions of her actions, not when she’s like this. All she knows is she has to see Ben. She has to make sure he’s okay. She has to talk to him. She’ll tell Mr. J she went for a walk, maybe bring something home for him, like a snack or something, so he doesn’t get suspicious.

_Just went to the store, Mr. J. Lost track of time. _

That’ll be fine.

Ruby spots her immediately when the cheery little overhead bell announces her arrival. The older woman is on the opposite side of the diner, standing over a booth with two customers, taking their order, maybe, but it’s always a little hard to tell; she never uses a notepad like the other waitresses do. How she remembers everything, Taylor will never know.

Ruby’s head cranes towards the door when she enters, and Taylor sees her arch a thin brow, catches the slight narrowing of her eyes.

Taylor quickly ducks away, cradling her cast almost as if to protect it from the burning scrutiny of Ruby’s gaze.

She keeps her head down as she skirts past the customers at the counter and the booths butted against the windows. She catches more than a few glances as she passes; she might as well be toting a rainbow flag behind her to announce her presence. Her casted arm is bright blue and obnoxious, and there’s no hiding her busted lip and the gash on her head, her hair still a little matted with the leftover crust of dried blood. The attention—all these curious eyes—makes her face turn hot, but she tries to ignore it as she approaches the double doors leading into the kitchen, heart thudding, pushing against the cage of her ribs.

_Ben. Ben. Ben. _

He should be working today. He always works Saturdays.

She bursts through the kitchen doors—making more noise than she had intended as the doors bang against the walls and then swing closed behind her—and her eyes find him immediately. She exhales in relief, and Ben turns to look at the source of the noise, his eyes widening when he sees her.

“Taylor,” he says at the same time she says, “_Ben_.”

Her voice is all broken, warped from the sudden itch of tears lodged in her throat. She goes to him as he quickly shucks off his rubber gloves, draping them over the edge of the big metal sink.

She doesn’t know why she’s crying all the sudden, but she stands there like an idiot, arms limp at her sides, wishing Ben would just reach out and envelope her. _Hug her_, damn it.

His eyes dart around the kitchen for a moment, but the two of them are mostly hidden behind the bulk of an industrial-sized refrigerator. He is quick to usher her out of the kitchen, ducking out of his apron as he goes. He tosses it over a metal folding chair in the breakroom, and then guides her out the backdoor.

They spill out into golden hour. The sun—a trembling, bright yellow disc—hangs sandwiched between the mouth of the alley, the whole sky bleeding behind it, orange and warm and somehow achingly familiar. It ignites a primal instinct within her—seeing the sky this color—awakening some long-forgotten ancestral link, something inside her that’s been dormant for a long time. Had her mother’s mother gazed upon a sunset like this? Experienced this same velvet warmth, a sunbath of gold, like being glazed in honey? 

Taylor wraps her arms around Ben’s waist before the door is even finished slamming shut behind them, and Ben hugs her back, holding her so tight, tighter than Mr. J ever has. She cries into his t-shirt even though he’s sweaty, stinking of Clorox and wet food. She catches the tendrils of some minty aftershave along his jaw.

“Hey, hey,” he soothes. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

She melts into his concern—concern that she knows is genuine. She feels like she can be herself around him. Like he really cares. She knows she can be honest with him, let her guard down with him in a way that her survival instincts won’t allow with Mr. J.

The sun and Ben’s strong arms are comforting and warm along her back, and it feels _good _to melt, like she’s thawing out after the icy burden of a long, hard winter. 

“I just—” she hiccups, crying even harder. She clings to the back of his t-shirt, white-knuckled, the muscles in her forearms taut and straining. Her right arm throbs inside its cast. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” she sniffles into his chest. “I missed you.”

For a long moment, Ben doesn’t say anything, and her heart falters. Was that too much, saying that she missed him? But then, after a moment, he slips an arm around her waist and rubs her back with his other hand while she cries, his big palm sliding back and forth between the sharp hunch of her shoulder blades. She can hear the slight smile in his voice when he speaks.

“Of course I’m okay,” he says, releasing a prolonged exhale. “And I missed you, too.” His hand slows some, dipping a little lower down her spine, tracing it with the pads of his fingertips, feather-light. “I tried calling the hospital to see how you were, but they wouldn’t tell me anything.”

She pulls back after a moment to look up at him, and Ben pulls back too, his arms falling away. He squints and has to shield his eyes from the sun when he looks down at her.

“Why didn’t you come to see me?” she asks, swallowing to urge more moisture back into her mouth. She wipes her tears away with the back of her forearm. “I was so scared, and I… I wanted you there.”

Ben’s face crumbles, and he bows his head for a moment to stare at the cracked asphalt beneath their feet. She studies the dark fan of his eyelashes pressed against his cheeks, the bony prominence of his overlarge nose. His smattering of beauty marks and slapdash of mismatched freckles. Such a hurried quality to all of his features, she thinks, like God was running out of time when he made Ben.

“I wanted to come,” he says. He scrunches up his face, looking up, squinting at the big ball of the sun suspended behind her. “But the cops were grilling me about the accident, and what we were doing, and like, you’re so much younger….” He palms at the back of neck, eyes sliding up, towards the drooping power lines that are tethered between the diner and the laundromat, glittering like gold chains. “It just looks bad, you know?” He cringes a little, like he doesn’t like the way it all sounds, like he could’ve phrased it better. 

Taylor bites down on her lip, tastes the copper-crust of old blood. “Oh,” she says. Her cheeks flush at the insinuation of something more than just friendship kindling between them, something she’s tried not to give too much thought to.

Ben seems antsy all the sudden, craning his neck over his shoulder to look back towards the back entrance to the diner. “Listen,” he says, “why don’t you come over after I’m finished here? We can talk some more. I’ve gotta give you your phone back. Maybe I can sign your cast.” He smiles a little, watching her.

Taylor laughs, the first of the day. “What, like an autograph?”

Ben rolls his eyes. “Like, art shit. I’m pretty good at that stuff.”

Her eyes snap up to meet his. “You draw?” She can’t believe they’ve never talked about this before.

He cocks his head at her. “Yeah… do you?”

She bites her lip again, but this time she’s grinning. She nods her head with barely-contained excitement.

Ben smiles back, too. That broad, goofy grin that showcases his canines, and the happy folds of skin along the sides of his mouth. “Then it’s decided. You’re definitely coming over.”

She hangs out behind the diner until the end of his shift, sitting on the stack of wood pallets with her back pressed against the brick wall. She watches the sun dip below the horizon, the silhouette of skyscrapers looming in the distance, like black, quiet giants, so patient and still as they anticipate nightfall, waiting to come blinking alive in the darkness. Hundreds of lamplight eyes, the fireflies of the inner city.

He brings her a vanilla milkshake a little while later, and a napkin cradled with a handful of curly fries. She devours them both.

It’s dark by the time he gets out, backpack slung over both shoulders, his apron peeking out where the bag’s unzipped at the top. They walk to the bus stop together, and it feels familiar—comforting—and she can almost forget about the car accident and the lingering shame of her punishment, how her ass is still sore from Mr. J’s belt.

She tries not to grimace when she takes a seat next to the window on the bus. Ben slides in next to her, his knees pressed up against the seat in front of him as he spreads his long thighs.

“You practically need your own seat,” she teases.

Ben smirks, scoots closer to her so that she’s forced up against the window, giggling. “Lucky you’re so small you barely take up any room at all.”

They ride in comfortable silence for a while, even though there’s so much to say. The weight of it hangs in the air between them, but she doesn’t mind. She feels happy to be pressed up against him like this, the bus dark and empty save for the two of them. The windows of the bus are wedged open, just a crack, just enough for the warm breath of the city to slither in and send loose tendrils of her hair tickling against her jaw. Gotham glimmers at night, resplendent, passing by in a golden blur of honeycomb. The bus takes them beneath an overpass, and in the patch of momentary darkness, she imagines laying her head on Ben’s shoulder. She wants to—but would that be weird? Would he shrug her off?—and by the time she finally works up the courage to do it, the brakes are hissing to a stop, and the two of them shuffle off the bus.

She keeps close to Ben as they walk the handful of blocks it takes to get to his apartment. Ben lives in Old Town, better known as the slice of Gotham that’d been left to rot after the financial district had fallen into decay and was transplanted somewhere nicer back in the 80’s. He explains it all to her as they walk. Now all that’s left is the flagellated corpses of old buildings—beautiful structures, some of them, the kind of old architecture that had been carved out of stone instead of the more modern glass and steel that is favored today. They walk pass what used to be City Hall, its beautiful, Corinthian stone columns still intact, though now marred with graffiti. Beyond that, the doors and windows boarded up. She spies more than a few sleeping bags lumped beyond the columns, spread out on the concrete. She shakes off the intrusive thought that that could one day be her if anything were to ever happen to Mr. J. She’ll be out of the foster system’s hair officially when she turns eighteen, even though she’s been skirting its boundaries for close to two years now. It’s strange to imagine having nowhere to go, no one to hold her accountable, no one to be responsible to. That level of independence is almost a little frightening, if she’s honest. What would she do with all of it?

Off to the right, there are two men leaning against the barred windows of a pawn shop, passing something smoky back and forth between them, and her heart flutters when Ben loops an arm around her as they pass, keeping her tucked close to his body.

A few blocks later, Ben unlocks a waist-high iron gate, and then she is following him up a long flight of stairs, into a red brick building with vines crawling up its sides. Threadbare carpet, and a long, narrow hallway with doors on either side. As they pad down the hall, she hears voices coming from a TV turned up too loud, and the sounds of a verbal spar, the sharp crack of shattered glass. More yelling. Ben seems to ignore it as he shoves his key in the lock and heads in first, holding open the door for her.

The lights are already on when she enters, and her eyes are drawn first to the cramped galley kitchen just off to the right. There are dishes piled high in the sink—stacked like a tower of Jenga blocks—and food left out on the counter: bottle of mayonnaise and mustard, a loaf of bread with the bag left open, a round pack of Oscar Meyer bologna. Dirty pans occupy every burner of the stove, and she also eyes the spatula crusted with dried egg, a half-eaten jar of Skippy peanut butter, and the cabinet doors that have been left wide open, a weird pet peeve of hers.

The rest of his living space is in equal disarray—there’s a small dining area with a basket full of unfolded clothes on the dining table, joined by a pile of junk mail, more unwashed dishes. No art on the walls. No framed photos of family or friends. Everything kind of monochrome and beige, not even one of those tacky ‘Great American Landscape’ calendars you get for free from the post office every year to adorn the walls with. There are some coupons clipped to the fridge, the only real source of color.

She glances into the living room and is surprised to find someone camped out on the futon. He has a video game controller in hand and his legs are propped on the coffee table—which at second glance is actually an overturned laundry basket.

He spares her an uninterested once-over and then goes back to his game without saying anything.

She turns to Ben, a question in her eyes. He never told her he had a roommate.

“We can go to my room,” he says quietly, closing and locking the door behind him. The chain over the door rattles as he slides it into place. “Just give me a minute, okay?”

She nods, and the look Ben casts over her shoulder to glare at his roommate is loaded. A warning.

“I’ll be right back,” he mumbles. “You can help yourself to whatever.” He nods to the kitchen as he backs away. 

She watches him lumber down the hallway, opening a door on the left and then disappearing from sight.

She’s left standing awkwardly in the doorway, cradling her cast as she takes in the apartment, trying not to openly stare at Ben’s roommate. He looks to be about the same age as Ben, maybe a little younger. Brown hair—buzz cut—skinny and milk-pale. He has a thin mustache on his upper lip and hollowed cheeks. She stares at the tattoo of a snake curled along his skinny right bicep, and upon closer inspection, she sees the snake is coiled through the eye sockets of a cracked skull. Gross. She shifts her gaze towards the empty beer cans on the floor near the couch, scattered around a pile of magazines. The TV console is loaded with DVDs and video games, which spill out onto the carpet.

“So how long have you and Ben been fucking?”

Taylor’s eyes widen. He doesn’t look at her when he asks, and she can only gape at him, fumbling around her reply. 

“We’re not—I mean, we don’t—” she huffs. “That’s none of your business,” she says, hotly.

He turns to look at her, silencing her with his arctic blue eyes as he pulls his headset off, letting it dangle around his neck. She recoils when his eyes slither up her legs, lingering on her chest for just a beat too long before meeting her gaze. She crosses her arms a little higher, for what little good it will do her.

“My bad,” he says, but he smirks when he says it, like it’s only a matter of time before Ben has his way with her. He goes back to his game, thumbs moving rapidly over the controller with the kind of ease and familiarity that only regular practice can award. She can’t really see the TV from here, but it looks like he’s playing some kind of combat game, the kind where you prowl through dark tunnels with rifles and stuff. She can hear the rapid fire of gun shells clinking against the concrete even through his headset.

She pivots awkwardly in the doorway, glancing back into the kitchen, wrinkling her nose some, feeling put off. Uncomfortable. Maybe it was a bad idea to come here.

“You must be one of the new ones, huh?”

She turns to look at him. “What?”

“From the diner. I swear, they go through them like fucking _panties _over there.”

“What are you talking about?”

A door opens down the hall, and Ben emerges a second later. His eyes dart between the two of them—almost suspiciously, she thinks—before he is standing behind her, hands on her shoulders, guiding her towards his bedroom.

“Hey Ben, you actually gonna keep this one around?” his roommate calls to him from the couch. Taylor doesn’t have time to ask what he means by that before Ben is grumbling something under his breath, pushing her into his room and shutting the door behind them.

“Shit. Sorry about Kyle,” he says. “He’s an asshole.” He scrubs a hand over his face, smoothing over his jaw for a second. “Did he say anything to you?”

Taylor shakes her head. She doesn’t want to tell Ben he’d asked if they’d fucked. Too embarrassing.

He steps around her and goes to his nightstand. “Should have your phone in here somewhere,” he mumbles.

She takes the opportunity to catalog his room. It looks like he’d spent the past five minutes shoving everything under his bed and into his closet in order to clear a path to the floor. There’s a visible cloud of body spray hanging in the air that makes her eyes water and her throat itch. AXE, maybe. She bites her lip and stares at the clothes that peek out from underneath his bed, other odds and ends of junk threatening to spill out from the closet, the door of which he couldn’t get to close all the way. It’s clear his bed was hastily made, and although his dark blue comforter is lumpy but soft-looking, it’s also a size too small for the queen-sized mattress, the edges falling several inches too short from the floor. The wooden desk underneath the single window is piled high with junk; CDs, notebooks, scattered pens and pencils, a Mason jar of loose change, some single-issue comic books and DVDs. A car manual and a pile of clean socks he hasn’t matched yet. He’s got a baseball hat perched on top of a bowling pin dated ‘1998’ in black Sharpie, and some miniature toy cars, old sports trophies, stuff he’d had as a kid.

She studies the posters on the walls, bands she’s never heard of, some film she’s never seen with Al Pacino, a dart board with a single dart right in the center of the bullseye.

It looks like a typical guy’s bedroom, not that she has many to compare it to. She’d ventured into Nathan’s room only once—snooping because nobody was home—and remembers feeling nauseous as she stared at all the pictures of bikini-clad women taped to his walls. He’d taken the liberty of scrawling crude words over their bare tummies and breasts, words like “FUCK” and “SLUT”, crossing out their eyes with angry black squiggles until you couldn’t see what was underneath anymore, drawing exaggerated ‘O’s over their mouths so it looked like they were caught in a perpetual state of shock. It was frightening, this unadulterated anger he harbored towards these faceless women he didn’t even know, women who clearly only served one singular purpose for him. 

“Think the battery’s dead,” Ben says, drawing her out of her thoughts. She lets go of the edge of his desk. She hadn’t realized she had been gripping it so hard. “Didn’t have a charger for it.”

“That’s okay.” She takes her phone from him, runs her fingers over its smooth surface, feeling glad that it’s still intact and the screen’s not busted from the accident.

“You can sit if you want to.” Ben gestures to his bed with a nod of his head, so she does. She props herself gingerly on the edge of his mattress, trying not to flinch, trying to school her features into some semblance of passivity. Ben, thankfully, doesn’t seem to notice.

He flops heavily into his desk chair, turning it to face her, stretching out his long legs with a sigh. He looks kind of goofy sitting there like that, so big and oversized in such a little chair, drumming his fingers on the armrests like he doesn’t know what else to do with them. 

For a few moments, he just stares at her, and Taylor bites her lip and tugs the hem of her sundress a little lower, careful not to expose the backs of her thighs.

“You got banged up pretty good, huh?”

She looks up, catches his gaze lingering on her cast. His eyes are full of guilt when he raises them to meet hers, and she shrugs.

“It doesn’t really hurt that much,” she says, quietly. It’s not a complete lie—it hurts less than her ass and thighs do, so that’s something.

“Yeah,” he says lamely, looking away.

They lapse back into silence after, and it’s strange, this heavy quiet that keeps laying its head down to rest between them. Normally the two of them run their mouths until they’re forced to stop, and even then it’s hard, almost impossible, but this silence now stretches so far and wide it’s like they’re standing on opposite ends of a lake. 

“I like your room,” she finally says, after the silence has stretched on for too long.

Ben smiles a little, like he knows she’s only commenting on it for lack of nothing else to say.

“You wanna see some of my drawings?” he asks, hopeful.

When she nods yes, he grins and springs to action, happy to have something to busy his hands with. The bed dips when he sits down next to her, a spiral-bound notebook in hand as he sheepishly hands it to her.

“They’re mostly just doodles and stuff. I don’t really have time to draw anymore like I used to.”

She’s only half-listening, eagerly flipping to the first page, eyes sweeping over the faces of characters she’s never seen before, characters she doesn’t know. She’s surprised to discover it’s mostly anime as she flips through the first several pages. Characters with big, round eyes and tiny mouths stare back at her. Sweet-looking girls with soft hair and baby doll dresses with puff sleeves. She flushes at some of the more explicit drawings—anime girls with body-defying proportions—watermelons for breasts, waists so tiny you could encompass them with just one hand. Tiny pleated miniskirts and white knee-high socks, the little shoes that buckle. One girl crouched on her knees, her thighs spread wide, eyes crossed, glassy and wide, and her pink tongue poking out, where she pants like a dog.

She quickly flips to the next page, embarrassed, but she can’t help but think of Nathan again and the naked women pinned to his bedroom walls. Do all men look at women through the same narrow lens, through the gaze of fantasy—explicit desire—and does it color their every interaction with the opposite sex?

Ben’s lines are clean, though, much cleaner than hers. He’s light with the pencil, and she can tell he strokes the paper softly, like a caress, almost. She, in comparison, is all hard, smudged lines, lines she retraces over and over until they’re thick enough to be the width of her pinky finger. There’s intention behind her strokes, frustration and impatience, but with Ben there’s just an easy lightness, an unexplainable air of tranquility. There’s room for smaller details in his work: the splatter of freckles and the little glimmer in someone’s eyes, the lace around the collar of a dress, the delicacy in which he draws the wavy, loose tendrils of someone’s hair, so that you knows it’s meant to be blowing in the wind.

She’s drawn towards a character in full body armor—some kind of warrior princess—wielding a blood-stained scythe while a long, tattered cape flows behind her, caught in the whisper of the wind. Sharp, curved spikes protrude from her gauntlets, and the breastplate of her armor has an intricate, circular insignia on it, almost like a labyrinth. Metal horns jut out from either side of her helmet, like the horns of a bull. Her long hair spills out from underneath her helmet, too. It’s decidedly feminine, but the warrior is all gnashing teeth. Through the slit in the warrior’s visor, Taylor can see that her eyes are narrowed with determination, the sort of fierce, uncut bravery she has always secretly longed for.

“I like this one,” she murmurs, tracing over it with the pads of her fingers, needing to lay her hands on it for some inexplicable reason, like maybe she could absorb the warrior’s powers through touch alone.

“That one’s pretty good,” he agrees. “What kind of stuff do you draw?” he asks as she flips through the rest.

“Everything.” She thinks back to her sketchpad, which she hasn’t touched in almost three months, maybe even longer. “Well, I used to draw everything. I was working on anatomy right before I… before I stopped.” She frowns, her eyes trailing away to fixate on a bald spot in the carpet near his desk.

Ben looks at her. “Why did you stop?” 

She tugs her lower lip into her mouth—habit—and then winces. She keeps forgetting about the raw, scabbed skin there. Why does everything have to hurt? Why does everything have to serve as a constant reminder of what she’s been through—what she’s going through right now?

“I mean, I just got busy with work, I guess, and—and….” She trails off, her frown deepening further. She hadn’t stopped to consider until now why she had stopped drawing, but she realizes suddenly it’s because of what Mr. J had said to her all those months ago, _not good enough_, and the realization hits her like a gut punch. She hadn’t even realized his words had cut her so deep until now. She had stopped because of _him_.

She doesn’t want to lie to Ben, but how can she possibly tell him the truth without ruining the fragile, tender threads that tether her to Mr. J?

Tears sting behind her eyes all the sudden, and she lifts her hands to her eyes to shield them from him, trying to stop the waterworks from coming, not wanting him to see. She’s struck with an acute sense of shame knowing that so many people have seen her cry, have witnessed her in such a state of vulnerability. He must think she’s pathetic, crying for the second time in front of him like this. 

“It’s just… it’s my uncle,” she chokes, and in the back of her mind she thinks, _Oh, God, I’m really doing this_.

She lowers her hands—no point in trying to stop the tears now—and looks at Ben through blurred eyes. His notebook still lays open in her lap, forgotten.

“What about your uncle?”

“I just… he’s just so… so _mean_ sometimes,” she says, her voice all breathy, strung high and tight from the raw, bloody sentiments that are cradled against the spine of her words. She has to pull them from her mouth by force, one by one, crank open her jaw a little wider, stick the pliers in, find the words and tear them out, like an abscess, like a rotting thing, something that’s been festering for far too long.

She tells him the comments he made about her art, and some of the other disparaging comments he’s made to her—innocuous stuff, really, nothing with any real meat to it—and Ben listens attentively, brows pulled together in concern.

“I know he cares about me,” she says, sniffling, “I mean, I think he does, but sometimes he… he _hurts_ me, and I still love him, and I… I have to, because he’s all that I have.” She’s crying again, thinking about how much there is to say. “And sometimes I don’t want to love him anymore, but it’s like I can’t help it, and then sometimes I think if I could just do better, if I could _be_ better, then maybe he’ll… he’ll love me back.” It all comes out in a rush, and she tries to catch her breath through her tears after. “And then I always think, maybe if he loved me enough then maybe he wouldn’t hurt me anymore, and it—it all just feels like a vicious cycle, like I’m trapped or something and I can’t get out.” She’s crying so hard she can’t even see straight, so hard that Kyle probably hears, but for once she doesn’t care what anybody else thinks. She’s finally gotten the words out, after three long, arduous years. She’s finally birthed this secret truth known only to her.

It should feel good, right? Unloading this secret, untangling herself from the vice-like coils it had wound around her rib cage, compressing the bones down until she thought her organs might puncture or burst.

She can breathe easier now without the enormity of this weight, her ribcage finally allowing for the full expansion of her lungs, but she also trembles under the knowledge of having told Ben one of her most intimate secrets. It feels like she’s just handed him the master key to a room full of doors. Which will he open first?

He waits until she’s finished before pulling her into his chest, looping his big arms around her, anchoring her to him. She clings to his t-shirt and cries while he rubs her back, lays his cheek down against the top of her head.

“Why doesn’t he love me?” she sobs, crying ugly tears, the kind where spit and drool bubble at her mouth, snot dripping down her nose. Ben’s shirt is wet from where her face is pressed against it.

She repeats the mantra over and over again in her head—_why doesn’t he love me?_ _Why doesn’t he love me?_—until she has no more tears left to cry, until she’s all dried up, her insides hollowed out, only an empty husk remaining.

“Hey,” Ben says, he pulls back some so he can look at her. “Hey, listen to me. Don’t worry about him, okay? _Fuck_ him for treating you that way. Fuck him for hurting you.”

Taylor swallows, looking up at him through a cascade of tears. Her eyes widen slightly at his expletives. She didn’t expect him to respond with so much righteous anger.

“You deserve better,” he says, the angry tremor in his voice vibrating through his chest, where she can feel it. “There’s nothing wrong with you. He’s just an asshole who doesn’t deserve you.”

Taylor’s heart clenches because of how wrong he is, because of how her and Mr. J may be the only two people in this world who truly do deserve each other.

“You don’t know the things that I’ve done,” she says. She squeezes her eyes shut tight, fresh tears spilling onto her cheeks. She chokes on her words as she forces them out. “I’m—I’m not a good person, Ben.”

Ben’s jaw is locked tight. “Does he tell you that?” he asks. “Because that’s not true.” He cups the back of her neck to draw her eyes up to his, and it’s different from the way Mr. J does it. Softer. “It’s not true. And you shouldn’t waste your time waiting for him to love you.”

She shakes her head, knowing that Mr. J is the only person capable of loving someone like her. That’s why she needs him. He’d told her from the very beginning that no one would want her, that Gotham would eat her alive only to spit her right back out, and he was right. Only he is capable of giving her what she needs.

Right?

“You shouldn’t let him treat you that way,” Ben goes on. “Don’t take his shit—dish it right back to him. Stand up for yourself.”

Taylor’s grip slackens some, not so white-knuckled as she considers his words. Could that really work? Would Mr. J loosen up some if she could prove to him that she’s stronger than he thinks? If she could show him how tough she is, maybe he’d like her more? Maybe he wouldn’t feel the need to protect her so much?

“You deserve better,” Ben says again, pulling her back into his chest. “Fuck him.”

He holds her for a long time as she sniffles into his t-shirt. He continues rubbing soothing circles into her back, tracing his fingers up and down along the knobs her spine, petting her hair. But even as she sits there with him, curled up and basking in the warmth and safety of his arms, her thoughts can’t help but drift to Mr. J. 

* * *

The Joker checks his phone for the seventh time in the span of the past hour.

Still in Old Town.

His lip curls in irritation, eyes narrowing. He is sitting at his desk in the dark, elbows propped on its wooden surface, hands steepled over his nose and mouth, staring into black nothingness.

Ressling is at the ready to intervene, should the Joker beckon him, but he isn’t ready to chase her down just yet.

He wants to see what she’ll do.

He leans back in his chair, taking his phone with him, sliding a little farther down to make himself comfortable. Props his ankle on his knee, opens up the app that mirrors her phone to his. No new messages. No outgoing texts. He puts down the phone, tongues at the inside of his cheek, thinking. He picks it back up a handful of seconds later, against better judgement, pulling up the picture she took in the dressing room, the one he’s looked at a hundred times now. Her in that _fucking_ green dress, and a muscle in his jaw twitches as he looks, and looks, and_ looks_. Her eyes are downcast in the photo, like she was too embarrassed to meet her own gaze in the mirror, and it’s so quintessentially _her _he can’t help but marvel at her transparency, how openly she bares herself to the world. Hard not to think about the way she had pressed up against him that night at her little dance, tilting her head back against his chest, staring up at him from underneath the fan of her eyelashes.

_I wanted you to see me. _

She has no idea of her power, no understanding of the strength she could wield if she wanted, all the ways in which she is a force of a nature, like the moon and the tides, the startling force of her gravitational pull. The way in which she had come bursting into his life all those years ago, like the white-hot flash of a solar flare, blinding him with her verve, her honeyed sweetness, disrupting so many of the fundamental truths he thought he knew.

But she is easily undone—even if she still clings to that obstinate tendril of inherent goodness that is rooted somewhere deep inside her, someplace where even he can’t reach. She’s unyielding in that regard—incorruptible—even after all the shit he’s put her through, even after all the things he’s done. Her goodness is the last thing she has left, and he hungers to strip it from her, bare her down to her marrow, lap it up from the bone. He wants her in his mouth—her sweet temperance, her_ righteousness_—wants to know just how good she tastes when the two of them finally come together, when her blood is mixed with his. 

He knows she’s almost ready for the final push. It’s taken longer than he thought it would, and he’d be remiss to admit his patience has been wearing thin. Sometimes physical distance is the only method of restraint he has to employ, and he makes himself scarce—_desirable_—so that he knows she’ll miss him in his absence.

She doesn’t wait at the door for him to return like she used to though, no longer a well-trained puppy, but a _dog_—a dog who no longer allows itself to be tugged around on its retractable leash. No, she wants the muzzle off, wants to run in fields without fences, wants_ freedom_, panting after it with a single-mindedness that borders on reckless. He has to be careful—precise—in how he awards it to her.

But she must know they’re on the brink of something—a steep precipice—and once they go forward, tumbling off the edge, there will be no going back.

In the beginning, it was amusing watching how she handled her newfound independence, seeing all the ways in which she wined and dined herself with the money her gave her—and, oh, how _sweet _she was when she’d come to him asking for it, how bashful, like she thought she was putting him out and that ashamed her.

But he noticed all the little new things she bought for herself, the clothes that actually fit, the little things for her room, string lights and a baby succulent for her nightstand; the smear of blush on her cheeks. Shoes that were no longer held together by duct tape.

But even more fascinating than that was the discovery of the things she was doing with all her burgeoning desire, her pent-up _need_, the buds of which he’s been tending to for quite some time. How careful he’s been not to overwater, vigilant in the way he shields her from too much direct sunlight.

But if she is a flower, it’s possible that she is one that blossoms only at night, aided by darkness. He delighted in listening to her touch herself at night, watched her browse through _porn_, of all things—rolling his eyes as he watched her type into the search bar, and then backspace, and type again, his sweet, good girl, so _embarrassed_, even in the safety and comfort that being alone in the dark provided. It didn’t take long for her to start making sounds on her own, unaided by any external titillations, and that he especially enjoyed—her finally coming into her own—and then her traitorous blush first thing in the morning when she padded barefoot out of her room, meeting his steely gaze with her bashful one, even though she had no idea all the things he’d heard. All the things he’d seen. 

His phone pings with an update, and he opens a text message from Ressling.

_00:04_

_Just left. Boarding bus. ETA 30 minutes._

Good.

Ressling would follow the bus, make sure she didn’t make any more unplanned detours, and then depart once she’d made it back. 

He checks the tracking app to be certain, and sure enough, there’s movement. He wonders what things she’s been up to with her little new friend, _Ben_.

There are risks, of course, in allowing her to be so close to him, in letting her go to his apartment where the Joker’s eyes don’t reach, but he also knows there are certain safeguards in place that will prevent Ben from doing anything, uh, _untoward_.

He’s confident Ben will misstep soon enough anyway—without any external prompting from himself—so the need to intervene is unnecessary. For now. He wants to watch their little friendship crash and burn of its own volition. Ben is temperamental—a loose cannon—and the Joker only has to make sure that Taylor doesn’t get caught in the resulting debris of his inevitable explosion. 

He may even comfort her after—she’ll want to seek solace after her friendship with Ben clots off and then ruptures—and he is overdue to give her some. She’s much more compliant when he feeds her a few morsels of affection, anyway, and she always laps it up so eagerly.

He tongues at the insides of his cheeks as he waits, tongue prodding at the gnarled bump of scar tissue there, but the longer time ticks on, the more his anger begins to mount, morphing into something fire-hot, something no longer palatable, making it impossible to sit still. He gets up to pace.

When he hears the crunch of her key in the lock, an excited shiver rolls down his spine, awakening a still-tender bruise from earlier that day, courtesy of a blow to his left kidney. He doesn’t mind. Just so long as he gets to close his eyes later and imagine it was Batman and not his _little bird_. He has no interest in playing head games with Batman’s inept successor—or whatever Nightwing is supposed to be. 

He watches her from the hallway when she comes in, so quiet. She thought she could sneak in without him noticing. Maybe she thought he wouldn’t be home. Either way, he tastes her trepidation and it is _sweet_. 

It’s bold of her to be out so late, especially given the events from the other night. Her subsequent punishment. She’s really pushing him—gas pedal all the way to the floor, accelerating like she can’t get to where she’s going fast enough, like there’s no consequences to her actions.

She startles when she sees him, her little sharp intake of breath like music to his ears. He likes when he takes her by surprise, when she’s so openly afraid of him. There’s something fascinating about the juxtaposition of her fear when it’s so inexplicably intertwined with her inability to stay away. How she just can’t help but be drawn to him, more than just moth to flame, but something else, something deep-rooted. Ingrained. Science or soul magic, he isn’t sure, but he knows she would’ve found her way to him even if she’d had to crawl through the narrow aperture of space and time. Even then, she would’ve found a way to pave herself a path straight to him. 

It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. In the living room, the plastic blinds are slanted just enough to allow the light from a nearby streetlamp to slither through. Sallow, yellow light stripes the carpet, parts of the coffee table and couch. He wonders how that light would look striped across her bare skin, how it might look when it’s crisscrossed over the constellations of bruises that he knows are stained along the back of her ass and thighs.

He approaches. Slow.

“You really have an _itch_, don’t you?” he says. “You just can’t seem to sit _still_.” She stares at him, her green eyes always so big and expressive, even in the dark. He feeds off her fear, coming closer, cocking his head. “Where did my girl run off to this time?” he murmurs. “Where did she go?”

He knows, of course. But he likes watching her flounder—and he’s curious to see if she’s brave enough to try and warp the truth.

She swallows, her eyes darting behind him for a second, almost as if she expects someone else to be there, but there’s no Ressling this time. Just the two of them.

“I just needed some fresh air,” she hedges, like maybe this isn’t the first time she’s tested these words on her tongue, but now that she’s said them out loud, she isn’t so sure about how he’ll interpret their legitimacy. 

He makes a show of glancing over his shoulder towards the clock on the stove. He knows it’s almost one AM, but he delights in drawing this out. Making her nervous. Without turning his head, his eyes crawl slowly back to meet hers. He hums thoughtfully, taking the opportunity to step closer still, so she’s forced to take a stumbling step back towards the door.

“Did you uh, _get _some?”

She nods like she’s not sure if that’s the right answer.

He mouth splits into a grin. Oh, his good girl—so _precocious_—but she’ll always be a bad liar. It’d almost be _cute_ if it weren’t such a detriment to her own safety.

“Why don’t you try that again?” he says, smile gone.

She frowns at him, brows furrowing together. “Try… what?”

“Telling me a lie that’s a little more_ convincing_.” Her breath catches, and his eyes drift briefly down, watching the bob of her throat when she swallows. He leans down over her, closing the distance between them until he can feel her hot puffs of breath against his jaw. “I know you didn’t _mean _to insult my intelligence…”

“—I didn’t!”

“Then maybe you’d like to tell me the truth, hm?”

She searches his eyes for a long moment, one half of her face bathed entirely in darkness, the other in shadow. She shifts her weight to her other foot. Something in her expression seems to harden as he waits for her response.

“I don’t see why that matters,” she says, so quiet he almost has to strain to hear, “it’s not like you don’t already know.”

_Well_. He draws back from her, turning his head, looking at her from the corner of his eyes. She does _surprise_ him sometimes, doesn’t she?

She watches him carefully, trying to read him, trying to figure out how this is going to go. “That’s how you knew I was at the hospital, right?”

He wasn’t quite ready to reveal that card to her yet, but he supposes the cat’s out of the bag now; no point in trying to fight to put it back.

He closes the distance between them, so she’s forced up against the door. He takes her chin in his hand, maybe a little too rough.

“Just looking after what’s_ mine_,” he says. “Or did you forget?”

She surprises him when she yanks her chin out of his grasp, her eyes narrowing while his own flash red in the darkness.

“Is that what you’re calling it?” she asks, full of teenage sarcasm, the kind that makes his spine prickle with want to bend her over something and set her straight. Give her an attitude adjustment.

He allows silence to stretch between them for a long moment as he runs his tongue over his top row of teeth. Works his mouth to the left side, staring.

“Are you _done_ yet?”

She folds her arms across her chest—as best she can, anyway—looking ridiculous with her bulky cast. “Done with what?” she snaps.

He leans down over her, eyes full of heat as he places the flat of his palms against the door on either side of her head. “Being a _brat_.”

Her nostrils flare, fists clenched until her knuckles are all shiny and white, and it’s _beautiful_. He watches the murky, darkening pools of rage forming in her eyes, and he thrills at having reduced her to a baser thing, finally having successfully unshackled her from her usual reservations. He wants her feral and frothing and sharp. Wants her anger so pungent he can taste it coating the back of his throat. _Show me your claws, little girl, _he thinks, giddy._ Bare me your razor teeth. _

She huffs at him, turning her head away, and he thinks, _that’s it, just a little bit further now_.

“What’s got you so riled, hm? Still mad about your _punishment_?” he prods. 

It takes a minute, but she does turn back to look at him, and this time there are tears shining in her eyes. “You made him _hurt_ me,” she says, her voice catching, some of her earlier bravado starting to recede. 

“Oh, _sweetheart_,” he coos. He’s smiling when he releases her from the cage of his arms, moves to cup her face in his hands instead, tilting her head up to meet his. “You’re not mad that I let him hurt you. You’re mad that it wasn’t _me _hurting you.” 

He watches her eyes widen, the telltale parting of her mouth, just slight, and he knows he’s hit the nail right on the head. Her lower lip trembles as she looks up at him, so helpless, so_ fragile_, and for a moment he thinks she’s going to cry, but then her eyes are hardening again, her brows pulling together in anger, and she’s vicious when she shoves him off her, forcing him back.

“Stop it!” she screams. His pulse jumps excitedly. “Don’t—don’t put that stuff in my head!”

He stares after her, grinning, as she backs away. “What ‘_stuff_’?” he purrs, like he doesn’t know.

She’s in the living room now, yellow light slashed across her bare calves and the hem of her sundress as she watches him approach. If she thinks she can keep running away from him, keep putting distance between them, she’s dead wrong. He’ll close that gap. He’s about to rid her of it permanently.

“You just—” She presses a hand against her head where her wound is, looking stricken for a moment, like it’s hurting her. “Ben said you would do this. That you would try to manipulate my feelings.”

The Joker stops dead in his tracks, a muscle in his jaw pulling taut.

“You _told_ him… about _me_?” He has to grit out the words, like there’s sand caught between his teeth. 

“No!” she says quickly, holding up her hands, as if she means to fend him off in case he should pounce. “No,” she goes on, quieter now, “I just—I told him you were a friend. He doesn’t know you’re… you. I wouldn’t do that.”

His blood’s _boiling_. Of all the things he had expected her to say, it was not that. The knowledge hits him like a freight train. She had _confided_ in him—she had told Ben about their _relationship_.

“What else did _Ben_ tell you?”

She looks at him hesitantly, like she doesn’t want to say. “He—he said that I deserve better. That you’re lying to me when you tell me I’m worthless,” she says, in a small voice.

The Joker’s shoulders turn rigid, and he instinctively hunches them up, closer to his ears. His hands curl into fists at his sides.

“If you _ever _speak to him again—”

Taylor’s face crumbles in an instant, and she shakes her head at him. “Mr. J, please, I need him!”

“No!” he snarls. “You need _me_.” He closes the distance between them so fast she has no time to escape. His hands clench around her upper arms with a vice. He shakes her so hard he imagines her bones rattling. She looks up at him with wide, terrified eyes. He can see her better in this light, can see the wet trail her tears have left behind, shining on her cheeks. “You think you need him because he makes you feel _better _about yourself, makes you feel like a good person. You’re so wracked with guilt over Nathan you can barely stand to look at yourself in the mirror.” He sneers at this, like he finds this pathetic. “But Ben makes you feel good, doesn’t he? Like you’re not a piece of filth spit out by Gotham.”

Tears stream down her face as she looks at him. “STOP!” she screams. “Stop! He told me that I’m a good person—I’m—I’m a good _person_,” she wails.

“And you bought into his artifice, didn’t you?” he sneers. “You ate that shit right up.” He is quickly losing control of the situation as his fury threatens to reach a boiling point. He’s practically blind with rage when he takes her and shoves her into the nearest wall again, hard enough that the back of her skull cracks against it, and she cries out, blinking back more tears. He curls his hand around her throat, forcing her head back and up, so she has to meet his eyes. “Let me tell you something,” he growls. “He wants one thing from you. All men do. You live in that shadow. You will _always_ live in that shadow.” He shifts so he can invade more of her space, so she can breathe only him. “Don’t mistake his lust for _love_,” he says, spitting out the word as if it were filthy, as if it had left a sour coat on his tongue.

Taylor looks at him, and looks at him, and if he weren’t so angry he might be able to enjoy the rapt attention she fixes him with. After a moment, she swallows against where her throat is encased in his palm, standing up on her tip toes some to raise her head up so she can talk.

“Maybe I’ll just give him what he wants then, huh?” she spits, her earlier bravado back, so bitter, even through a steady track of tears.

His frown deepens. “Will you?” he says. So _ballsy_ of her to threaten him, as if she would ever actually go through with something like that. He cocks his head at her, voice full of gravel. “Maybe I’ll make you wish you were never born.”

She laughs—_laughs_. “Too late for that.” She’s starting to struggle in his grip, her hands gripping the forearm that keeps her pinned to the wall via her throat. “I’ve been wishing I was never born since the moment I met you,” she hisses.

The Joker’s eyes darken, narrowing into dangerous slits. He’s heard enough.

She must see it, too, because he catches the unadulterated _terror _that mars her features in the split second it takes for his grip to tighten around her throat.

Then he is hauling her away from the wall, towards the couch. She fights him the whole way, and when he sits on the couch and tugs her over him, bending her over his knee, her eyes bug.

“Mr. J, no! _No_!” She’s writhing so hard she is almost able to dismantle, but he puts a hand between her shoulder blades and viciously shoves her down, towards the carpet. “You do this every time!” she screams. “Every time I say something that you can’t counteract and you know that I’m right!” She continues to fight him as he gets her where he wants her. “You just beat it out of me,” she pants, chest heaving. For a moment, he had felt her little heart thudding furiously against his thigh before repositioning her, and something about that made his cock throb. He can hear the fear in her voice as she continues. “Every time you feel your control slipping—”

“Think I liked you better when you weren’t such a spoiled _brat_,” he interrupts, snarling. 

When he flips her sundress up, baring her ass and thighs to him, she writhes with renewed vigor.

“_Stop_!”

His whole body trembles with anticipation as he rips his glove off with his teeth, wanting to feel the heat of her bare skin against his own. His eyes are full of fire as they rake over all her bare flesh, and he gives her no warning before he spanks her, just once, hard enough to make her cry out. He relishes in seeing his angry red handprint on her right ass cheek, right alongside her other assortment of mottled bruises.

“What’s this about, hm?” He’s stroking her ass with one hand, so gentle, feeling the angry, red heat of her skin bleeding through to his palm. She’s so soft. “I don’t love you like he does? I don’t _care_ for you the way he does?” He runs his finger down the crack of her ass, feather-light, and she whines underneath him, squirming. “He makes you feel all _fluttery_ inside and I don’t?” When he cranes his neck to glance at her sex, he inspects it almost clinically. It’s been a long time since he’s looked at her like this, and he allows himself to take his time as his eyes devour her, raking over her bare skin like hot coals. After a long beat, his eyes narrow suddenly and he snarls. “Or maybe you just want to get _fucked_.”

His punctuates his words by shoving a hand between her legs, cupping her sex so hard the movement jostles her forward some, so she has to brace her hands against the carpet. She gasps in shock, cheeks burning, her whole body jerking up like she intends to get away, but he holds her fast. She’s not going anywhere.

“Hm, am I getting warm?” He teases. He curls his fingers some, the palm of his hand flattening against that intoxicating warmth between her legs as she struggles to control her breathing, her breath leaving her in quick, shuddery exhales. “Oh, there we are,” he coos, feeling around. “_There’s_ the nerve that needed to be struck.”

Taylor can’t speak, immobilized—stunned—by the sensation of his bare hand moving between her legs.

“I know you’ve wanted this,” he says, lowering his voice until it’s just a rumble, “that you think about this at night, alone in your bed. That you think I can’t hear you when you touch yourself. That I can’t _see _you.”

A shuddery exhale of indignation escapes her in response, and he chuckles, stroking his fingers through the lips of her sex, relishing in the way it feels. She’s not as wet as she was when he had her menstrual blood to help slick the way, but he slides his fingers through her folds anyway. He’s getting her there, and he’ll have her slippery soaked by the time he’s done.

“You didn’t _really_ think I wasn’t watching you, did you?” He’d installed the camera in her room after the incident with Tetch, so he could watch her when he was away. Make sure that Alice in Wonderland-obsessed nut job didn’t come back to consummate their relationship. “I _told _you… I _always _see you.”

She’s panting hard into the carpet, white-knuckled, nothing to hold onto. “You—you watched me?”

He hums, knowing she can feel the vibrations when he does. “I _like_ watching you.” He thinks about how the camera was both too much and yet not enough, how he wishes he could be with her everywhere; how badly he wants all of her, all the time. “You’re insatiable in more ways than one, aren’t you?”

“You’re disgusting!” she cries. She squirms in his lap, but there’s nowhere to go. Her arms tremble from the strain of having to bear the weight of her upper body, where her hands are braced against the floor.

The Joker groans in response, a guttural sound that’s pulled from somewhere deep inside his chest. “Did you think of me, when you touched yourself?”

She’s too quick when she shakes her head ‘no’, indignant, but he knows that she did. He’s always known. He smiles to himself, letting out a little puff of laughter, breathing out through his nose.

“Did you think about me touching you just like this?” He slows his movements, taking a moment to prod with his middle finger, finding the bud of her clit and circling. So gentle. He lowers his voice an octave. “Or maybe you imagined me _inside _you.”

“P—please,” she gasps, sounding like the plea has been punched out of her, not sure what it is exactly she is asking for.

He smirks, shifts on the couch. His cock could cut fucking diamonds with how hard he is right now.

“I told you you’d beg for it,” he says. “I told you you’d _want _it.” Electricity courses through him, so hot and fast it’s near dizzying. He has to close his eyes to right himself. “Do you remember?” he asks.

_He_ remembers. Their little conversation in the park. The way she’d looked at him, the sun combing through her hair, standing there by the pond, looking so tiny and fragile and sad, how wracked with guilt she’d been—with doubt—afraid that she wouldn’t be able to exact revenge on Nathan, that she wouldn’t have the courage to follow through with the Joker’s plan.

He remembers her revealing to him that she wasn’t angry with Nathan, but _sad_. She’d felt violated by the things he had had done, the way he’d rutted between her thighs every night until he’d reached completion, using her body for his own release. But he’d never penetrated her, never left anything behind that could be traced back to him.

He remembers telling her that he’d take that from her first—her innocence—that that had always belonged to him, from the very beginning. Remembers when she had asked him,_ “What if I don’t want you to?”_

He marvels at how far they’ve come.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart.” He licks his lips, and then leans down to spit between her legs so suddenly that it makes her jerk up in surprise. “Don’t worry,” he murmurs. “I’ll take what’s mine.” He sets to work with renewed vigor, spreading his saliva through her folds, working her like an instrument, knowing exactly what strings she needs pulled, fueled by her soft little gasps. Her moans. He knows what his girl needs. 

“You weren’t going to let him fuck you,” he goes on, talking about Ben again, circling back to her earlier threat. “You can’t even bear the thought of him _touching_ you.” That stupid fucking boy stuck in a man’s body, probably couldn’t even properly fuck his own fist. “Only _I _can touch you. Only I can give you what you need.”

“_Uhn_,” she says, as he slicks his fingers through her, so slow. He smiles at having reduced her to complete incoherency. _Jesus_. Nothing has ever felt this good, this _satisfying_. Her compliancy so _sweet_—

He feels feverish—fire-hot—as he removes his hand and pulls her up suddenly, flipping her onto her back, spreading her out on the couch. He needs to see her. Needs to catalogue her pleasure.

The coffee table is too close, in the way, as he maneuvers her exactly how he wants her, irritating him when he bumps into it with his thigh, and it takes only a second for him to grip the edge of it with one hand, angrily flipping it onto its side, away from him, and the whole thing shatters, falling apart in a rain of glass. The lamplight catches on all that broken glass after, like the shards of a ruined sun scattered across the carpet.

Taylor doesn’t even turn to look, her eyes fixated only on him as she opens her thighs for him, spreading her bent knees so he can fit himself between them. He rucks her dress farther up, revealing her belly button and the soft, gentle swell of her waist. He swallows as he devours her bare skin, taking it all in. When his eyes slide up to meet hers, her own eyes are blown wide as she stares up at him. Glossy. Black. Impossibly pretty. He doesn’t think he’s ever been this hard in his goddamn life.

He keeps his eyes on her face as he lowers his hand back to her, circling her clit with his thumb. Her right arm, the one with the cast, is thrown up, over her head, resting along the armrest, while her other arm dangles uselessly over the side of the couch. Hair splayed behind her like halo, her cheeks ruddy, hot with her blush. She whines when he starts to work a finger inside her, lifting up her hips, keening as she squeezes her eyes shut.

“We’re not going back after this, to what we were before,” he tells her. He wants that to be clear. He _needs_ that to be clear. His middle finger slips in up to the knuckle, and even_ that’s_ a tight fit. She pants raggedly, trying to adjust to the intrusion.

“I—I don’t know what that was,” she says, gasping uselessly when he scrapes up against her front wall, stroking her there from the inside.

He punctuates his words with a sharp thrust of his finger inside her. “Denial. Selfishness. _Avarice_. You’re always letting people put their hands on you, aren’t you? Letting people take advantage of you.”

She tries to shake her head, voice breathy. Shot. “I wasn’t—“

“Call it what you want.”

She gasps when he introduces a second finger, arching her body towards him, head thrown back. Feels so _good_. He strokes her from the inside, gently, letting her adjust, and it doesn’t take long before she is shamelessly humping his hand, chasing the pleasure of his long fingers, chasing her own release.

“_J_—” she whines. Not Mr. J, but _J_.

“That’s a good girl,” he says. “Let it happen. Just like that.”

Her hips work in tandem with the pressure of his fingers. She lifts them to meet his thrusts, chasing pleasure that keeps climbing and climbing and climbing. How much higher can she possibly go?

She’s blissed out—emotional—as she looks up at him. “J, I—I love you,” she gasps.

His vision whites. He looks up at her sharply—her flushed cheeks, her parted mouth, forehead creased from the intensity of her pleasure—and he feels _invigorated_.

“Say it again.” He sounds like a rabid animal. Panting, mouth full of froth, wild-eyed. Needy for something to sink his teeth into. “Say it again,” he growls, impatient, twisting his fingers, reaching another place inside of her that’s never been touched.

“Please, please don’t stop,” she whines. “I love you,” she pants. She lifts the arm that was dangling over the side of the couch and uses it to clutch at his forearm, digging her nails in, feeling the muscles there jumping beneath his skin as he works her nearer to completion. “I love you so much.”

“Yes,” he breathes. “Yes, you do love me.” He’s manic, working his fingers faster and faster until she’s crying, pent up with the need to come.

She falls apart, finally, with his fingers inside her, his thumb on her clit, and she arches into it, her thighs trembling, head thrown back so he can only see the jutting of her pale throat. He knows it feels different than when she does it herself.

Afterwards, blind with pleasure, reeling from the afterglow of her orgasm, she pants up at him, his body caged around her, his jacket draped over her like a cocoon, trapping their body heat. They’re both panting.

In the semi-darkness, he watches as her gaze slides down to where he is clearly straining in his slacks.

She bites down on her lower lip, meets his eyes with a look that can only be described as _coquettish_, and makes to reach towards him.

He slaps her hand away. “I’ll take care of that,” he says, voice tight.

Except, he doesn’t—and he won’t.

He’s not going to come until he can do it inside her. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probably should have split this chapter in half, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Prompts filled during this two-part run of Cauterize: Taylor’s first job, someone having a crush on Taylor/being interested in her, and Taylor doing something behind the Joker’s back (i.e., her car ride with Ben). 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading and for your feedback thus far!


	8. Cauterize, Part lll

_“I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow.”_

_—Hélène Cixous_

She wakes in his bed.

Dawn is cool and slate gray, slithering in through the cracks in the closed blinds with gentle insistence, light that is silk-smooth and as sleepy as she is. She sits up, yawning, and folds her legs Indian-style as the covers pool around her waist. She rubs the sleep out of her eyes with both fists.

She’s still wearing her sundress from the night before—wrinkled, now, gathered around the tops of her thighs when she pushes the covers off—and she flushes at the memory of who had just been between them several hours prior.

Had he really _touched _her? Brought her to completion? Had it all just been some strange fever dream, a heady cocktail of her most depraved, desperate fantasies? 

She looks down, between her folded-up legs, and skirts her dress farther up her thighs, goose bumps pimpling over bare skin.

She isn’t wearing underwear.

Her blush deepens, hot as a sunburn, and the weight of what had transpired settles over her in a way that makes the place between her legs throb in memory.

_J, I—I love you._

The way he’d looked at her when she’d said that, the hunger in his eyes, the ravenous want. She had thought he would rip her open right there and just _take, _bleed her bone-dry and then feast himself on the shriveled carcass of whatever was left over of her when he was done. And the way she’d opened her thighs for him, inviting him in, so glassy-eyed with want and lost to pleasure she hadn’t even stopped to consider whether or not she should. She’d waited—_wanted_—for so long.

Had he waited, too? Had he wanted her for just as long?

It was hard to pinpoint exactly when want and need had bled together, one spilling over into the cup of the other until there was no telling them apart, until they were one. This truth she had swallowed, lapped at with feverish intent, savoring every last drop, like her soul was nourished by the taste of her desperation. Her greed. 

What was it that he had said to her? No going back?

_Good, _she thinks. She doesn’t want to go back. Not ever. She’s waited her whole life to feel the way she did last night—to feel wanted. Desired.

She crawls out of bed and pads to the door, combs her fingers through her hair, smoothing it out and neatly tucking it behind her ears.

For a moment, after the door clicks open, her hand drops back to her side and she can only stand there. She curls her toes into the curlicue fibers of the carpet, sucks in a slow, measured breath that makes her chest expand. Her heart thuds wildly—excitedly. She knows he’s waiting for her.

When she steps out into the hallway, the coffee table catches her eye first—lying in ruin, still—and glass shards are scattered across the caramel-colored carpet, some stray pieces having skidded across the linoleum and into the kitchen. It’s exhilarating—_breathtaking_—seeing the aftermath of his destruction, the evidence of his frenzy-fueled lust. It makes her spine prickle and her throat feel tight.

She finds him when she rounds the corner of wall that the couch is butted up against, and her heart clenches, bearing down, so heavy from the weight of everything she carries. Seeing him solidifies the memory of last night, remembering how _good_ he made her feel, and she is so full of reverence—a kind of veneration reserved only for unholy gods—as she pads closer.

He looks up when she comes fully into view, and she can only see the glimmer of his eyes from behind the newspaper. She feels bashful, for some reason, even though her heartbeat flutters at the way his eyes rake over her—starting low, sliding up her bare calves, first, her thighs, the length of her torso, and then the column of her throat. When he finally settles on her eyes, a slow, wolfish grin splits his face as he lowers the paper, and her heart convulses once again. She can’t help it. Everything is so different now. Even the air around them feels hyper-charged, lit up with something she’s never felt. There’s a new current of energy strung up between them, something crackling and hot to the touch—but even then she can’t keep her hands to herself, can’t ignore the sizzling heat, the call of livewire. Even then, she still yearns to touch.

“Morning, princess,” he drawls.

She sinks her teeth into her lower lip, bounces a little on the balls of her feet. Eager. Impatient. She wants to run to him, curl up in his embrace, but she doesn’t want to be overbearing. Too much. This is all so new. She doesn’t know what’s okay yet and what isn’t.

“Hi,” she says, excited—shy—but she’s smiling. When was the last time she’d smiled at him like this?

Mr. J grins when he pats his thigh, and she practically jumps at the invitation, biting her lip to curb some of her smile, but she can’t help it. She’s so _happy_. Has she ever been this happy in her whole life?

She weaves carefully through the rainstorm of glass, tiptoeing around it as best she can until she’s close enough to crawl into his lap. Relief floods through her when she is able to melt into his embrace, when his arm comes up to circle her back, supporting her, while the other wraps under her thighs where her knees are bent, pulled up to her chest. She can’t remember the last time she was cradled like this. Held like a baby.

“How’s my sweet girl this morning?” he murmurs, looking down at her. Her skin prickles where he skims his knuckles along the back of her calf. Up and down. Up and down, all the way to the back of her heel and then back up, to the delicate, sensitive crease behind her kneecaps. She stares up at him in open fascination. He’s so close she can see herself in the reflection of his dark eyes, and she can’t help but feel transfixed. Awed. It’s like they’re looking at each other for the first time or something. _Seeing _each other.

She comes back to herself after a moment, nods bashfully in lieu of a reply, still biting her lip. She’s good. Content. He doesn’t have to ask. It’s not like it isn’t written all over her face anyway.

She can’t help but think about how close she feels to him like this, when he’s stripped of his jacket, his vest, all his usual modes of armor. She likes feeling the shifting muscles in his abdomen. The power in his long arms. And it’s not often she gets to study the hexagonal pattern of his shirt so up close—how she never realized that inside each hexagon is a different design. She’d always thought there were little dots filled inside each hexagon, but upon closer inspection, she can see that some of them are tiny little squares connected to each other by thin lines. Other squares have a checkerboard pattern to them, almost too small to be seen by the naked eye. She shifts her gaze and reaches out to touch the green diamonds on his suspenders, the way they’re arranged like rows of shark teeth along the edges. Everything about him feels somehow brand new and fresh, like she’s seeing him for the first time. She is drawn to study every inch of him, map him out under new light, under the touch of her careful hands.

The thought of touching him in the way he’d touched her comes on so suddenly that it makes the blood rush to her head, makes her vision blur and fuzz around the edges. She remembers the thrill she’d felt when she’d realized he was hard, that he was turned on because of what they were doing.

But the way he had slapped her hand away when she’d went to reach for him… didn’t he _want_ her to touch him? Did he not think she was capable of bringing him to pleasure?

He had been quick to pacify her afterwards, though, slowly stroking her oversensitive clit with the pad of his thumb—curious, almost, watching her while he did it—making her arch up and squirm. Her little breathless laugh when her thighs closed around his hand, and then the easy way he’d opened her back up, his eyes so dark as he peeled her thighs apart, wanting one last look at her—all of her—before he’d picked her up bridal style and taken her to his room.

It dawns on her that he could’ve let her fall asleep on the couch. But when he’d deposited her on his bed, on top of the covers, it felt purposeful—the kind of thing done with intention—like he wanted her to know that this is where she’d be sleeping from now on. When she’d curled onto her side, facing him, the tendrils of sleep were already halfway to pulling her under. She remembers blindly pawing for him, wanting him in bed with her, and she thinks he might’ve chuckled as he pushed her hands away. Remembers him brushing the sweat-slicked hair back from forehead, and him hovering over her for a long time. Standing. Watching.

She swallows.

“I—I liked last night,” she says, quiet, braving a glance up. She quickly finds that she’s unable to endure the intensity of his black eyes. Has to look away.

“Did you?”

She can feel the rumble of his question vibrating through his chest. She focuses her attention on tracing her finger down the length of the suspender that’s closest to her. Her cast feels bulky and useless as it lays cradled against her abdomen, and she’s relegated to using only her left hand.

“It felt good,” she says, so softly. Her cheeks flood with heat after, and she leans forward to bury her face in the crook of his neck, clinging to the front of his shirt with one hand, embarrassed, but she’s glad she said it. It _did_ feel good.

He hums, whether in agreement or acknowledgement, she doesn’t know, but she feels the vibration of it, this time where her face is tucked against his neck, where she can feel his pulse throbbing beneath her cheek. She sighs when he nuzzles into her hair, nosing through the strands. It’s a strange sensation, feeling the puckering of his scar tissue pressed against the top of her head, but she likes it, likes this intimacy with him. Somehow he makes her feel like she’s the only girl in the world. The only girl that matters.

The moment takes on a familiar shape, like something out of her most tender dreams: the ones that cradle her softly during mid-morning, the dreams she has after she’s woken but then accidentally drifted back asleep. The kind she wakes from so slowly, like if she could just keep her eyes closed long enough, lie still enough, she might be able to sink back into the comfort of its embrace, into the safety of a world where everything happens just as she has always wanted it to.

She can’t help wondering how last night has shaped their future, what this all means. He loves her too, now, right?

“Mr. J?”

He hums again, his cheek still pressed to the top of her head.

“Am I your girlfriend?” she asks softly. 

The movement of his hand stills against the back of her calf for a moment, just long enough for her to notice. He resumes stroking. 

“Do you want to be?”

His voice makes her shiver, and all she can do is nod into his neck, incapable of speech, incapable of voicing just how much she wants that. _A thousand times yes_, she thinks. She wants it. She wants it so much.

Mr. J chuckles, and she thinks for a moment that maybe he can read her thoughts. She’s embarrassed until she feels his cheek sliding through her hair, so she can feel the hot press of his mouth against the shell of her ear. 

“You’ve always been my girl, though, haven’t you?”

His long fingers curl around the fleshy portion of her calf, squeezing, and she swallows, nodding again.

She feels his other hand sliding up her spine, cupping the back of her neck, pulling her out of the place where she’s sought shelter. He forces her to meet his gaze.

“I said, _haven’t you_?”

She nods desperately, eyes wide, searching. “Yes.” There’s an incredible, gaping abyss buried within the depths of his eyes that she is afraid to prod at, so she doesn’t. “Yes.”

He searches her eyes too, looking for any traces of doubt, any signs of hesitation, but there is none. His mouth stretches into a satisfied grin, his black eyes glittering. He digs his fingers into the back of her neck and pulls her towards him, bends down to touch his forehead to hers. 

“All mine.”

Her heart throbs at his proclamation, this claim of ownership, like being branded all over again, and it doesn’t matter that she has chosen not to prod at the abyss—it’s going to swallow her up anyway, whether she wants it to or not.

She shivers as she looks at him, his eyes so close. Fever-bright.

“All yours,” she whispers. 

* * *

The next few days unfold like a dream.

She spends every waking moment with him—every sleeping moment, too—curling herself around him at night, and he lets her.

He_ lets_ her.

It’s exhilarating, all the ways in which she is free to touch him now. She blossoms under this newfound freedom, no longer quite so shy to initiate contact when she wants it—and she wants it all the time.

Her curiosity is insatiable, and she lusts after pleasure and affection in equal measure. Now that she knows how good he can make her feel, she chases after the sensation at every available opportunity.

Maybe it’s shameless—a little desperate—but she just wants to be close to him. She hungers to stake her claim in the same way he’s staked his. She wants to own him. Possess him. _Brand_ him—maybe not in the same way he’s branded her—but she wants to leave her mark on him. Somewhere—anywhere. She wants her stain on his skin, a secret birthmark, one the color of red wine, something that cannot be removed, not without intent. Not without effort. She’ll have to be pried off—excised—but even then it won’t be enough. She’ll make a home under his skin, bed herself down in the soft tissue of his bones. Tangle herself inside the spider-web network of his capillaries, build herself a nest within the valve of his pulsing aorta, gorge herself on his insides until she’s blood-drunk and bloated, like a tick that’s finally had its fill—except she’ll never be sated.

She’ll be parasitic. She’ll be an infestation.

He’ll never be rid of her.

Does he know how much she wants him? Can he ever possibly know the extent of her obsession—her need?

She savors the moments when she gets to wrap her arms around him from behind, laying her head down on his back, her ear pressed to his spine. Sometimes she imagines she can hear the sound of his breath pushing through the branches of his lungs, like when you press a seashell to your ear and can hear the echo of the ocean sloshing around inside.

Sometimes she spoons his back when they’re lying in bed, although she likes it best when he’s curled up behind her instead, winding his arms around her so tight it’s as though he hopes to absorb her body into his, like she could be capable of liquefying into the heat of his embrace. Disappear inside him, two becoming one, where she could live inside of him like a second pulse. 

When they’re lounging on the couch, she makes herself cozy in his lap, between his spread legs. She likes when she falls asleep like that, trapped between the V of his long legs, turned on her side, one bent leg thrown over his, her head pillowed on his chest or his abdomen. Sometimes he rubs her back when she’s like that, or combs his fingers through her hair, and she thinks she likes that best, the way his nails scrape against her scalp when he does it. She falls asleep with her fingers curled around one of the straps of his suspenders, and it’s just another way in which she likes to anchor herself to him. Sometimes he carries her to bed, and sometimes he lets her stay like that on the couch until morning, and when she wakes, sleepy-eyed and drowsy, she’s still lying between his legs, and he’s still touching her back or her head or trailing his fingers along her spine, like he never stopped.

It’s beyond her wildest fantasies—her most secret dreams. It’s everything she’s ever hoped for—this simple, domestic intimacy—and it feels so good she doesn’t think she’ll ever stop wanting it.

Sometimes she distances herself so that she can sketch him from afar—she likes it best when he works at his desk—that way she can sit in the overstuffed armchair in the corner and watch him from underneath the fan of her lashes, study the way his hands move, and the low, languid shadows that are cast upon his face from the gooseneck lamp. The way he habitually tongues at his lower lip, or tastes the ripple of scar tissue tangled inside his cheeks. The sharp, foreboding hunch of his broad shoulders, the crease between his brows when he’s deep in thought. His hands are her favorite to draw, the ropes of veins there, and his greasepaint-stained fingers, the curly blond hairs creeping up his wrist. There’s a long, vicious history scarred all over those calloused hands—violence and pain, death and destruction—and yet, somehow, there’s tenderness there, too, a touch so achingly soft it makes her knees weak just to think about it. A touch he reserves just for her.

One night, when she’s sketching him from the kitchen counter while he sits on the couch, he shoots up from the cushions, quick as a gunshot, and she instinctively snaps her sketchpad shut. He’s on her before she can slip away, caging her against the countertop with his arms on either side of her. She clutches her sketchpad to her chest like her life depends on it, heartbeat slamming against the confines of her ribs.

“What’s my girl drawing,_ hm_? Let Mr. J see.”

She shakes her head at him. No. No way. Too embarrassing. She doesn’t want him to know she’s been watching him. She doesn’t think she can handle him criticizing her art again. She already knows he doesn’t like it. She remembers what he’d said.

_Not good enough_.

When he tries to pry it out of her arms, she squeals. Mr. J is quick—lithe—but so is she. She ducks out from beneath one of his arms and slips off the barstool, dashing away from him and into the hallway before he can reach for her. In a split second decision, she turns right, into her bedroom, a place she doesn’t spend much time in anymore since she’s mostly moved all of her stuff into Mr. J’s room.

There’s nowhere to go in here, and she hears him behind her, even through the pulsing of her own bloodrush pounding in her ears. He has her pinned against her old bed before she can even blink, holding her down with his weight and then wrestling her onto her back, tickling her ribs and belly until she squeals with laughter and unwillingly relinquishes her hold. Something about the way he has her pinned feels good. Maybe she doesn’t fight back as hard as she should. 

“Mr. J, please—” she gasps, her fingers slipping from her sketchpad with ease. She never really had a chance, especially with her right arm trapped in the hard shell of its cast.

“Now, now, I just want to take a look at what’s got my girl so _preoccupied_.”

“It’s nothing—” she starts, and then doesn’t finish. 

He rises from the bed, and she slips off the mattress after him, already at his heels, trying to reach for her sketchbook, but he shields her from it with his body, chuckling. She whines in distress.

“Mr. J, please, I don’t want—”

He whirls on her so fast she instinctively stumbles back a step.

“What are you so afraid of?”

She blinks up at him. “What?”

“What are you so _afraid _of?” He advances on her until the backs of her knees hit the mattress, and she stumbles back, landing on her ass. She looks up at him.

“I—I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.” He opens up the sketchpad, and her heart lurches into her throat. “I already told you, I _see _you.”

She swallows, anxious as she watches him lower his eyes, his gaze raking over her sketches with careful attention. He flips through the pages slowly, taking time to linger on each one. 

Her face starts to burn hot the longer the silence stretches between them. After a long moment, he hums thoughtfully, and she bites her lip as he continues browsing.

“Looks like you see me, too,” he says, a knowing smirk unfurling at the corner of his mouth.

She flushes, awkwardly crossing her arms. She can’t wait to get this cast off. “It’s okay if you hate them,” she mumbles. 

“If I had only _known_ you liked my _hands _so much… ” he trails off, waggling his eyebrows suggestively. Taylor gapes at him, not sure if he’s serious or not.

“I—I don’t—” she stutters.

Mr. J tosses her sketchpad onto the bed, his full attention on her. Goose bumps prickle over her arms when he cocks his head at her. “You don’t?”

“I mean—I just meant that—”

He’s advancing on her again, and when he pushes her to lie flat on her back and leans over her, one knee on the bed, the other leg planted on the floor, she stares up at him with wide eyes, hardly daring to breathe, like her very breath will threaten to shatter the moment completely. 

“What _did_ you mean?” he murmurs.

She can’t speak, not when he’s so hot and heavy above her. Not when he takes her arms and raises them over her head—so slowly, like he’s testing whether or not she’ll resist—pins her hands to the mattress with only one of his. And she can’t speak when he traces along the line of her jaw with his finger, all the way to her chin. She exhales when he skirts a line down the column of her throat, down, down, down, between the valley of her breasts, cutting a line through the plane of her stomach, where her belly jumps beneath his hand. He stops, finally, when he reaches the button of her jeans shorts. Her hips lift off the bed, just slight, just enough for her to feel his puff of laughter against her cheek when he moves to hold her hip down with one big hand. His thumb smooths back and forth over the exposed skin of her hip bone, where her shirt has ridden up.

“You will _always _be a _bad liar_,” he says, lowly. He chuckles at this, watching her as he tongues at his lower lip for a moment, and she can’t help but follow the movement of his tongue with her eyes. He lowers himself further down to whisper in her ear, his belt buckle digging into her thigh. “Maybe next time you can be a _big girl_—” he says, and she squirms under his condescension, “—and use your _words_. Tell Mr. J what you _really_ think.”

She swallows. Nods.

“My girl knows how to ask for what she _wants_, doesn’t she?”

“Yes,” she says. _Lying. _His question feels like a challenge, and she can’t help but feel like this isn’t just about the drawing.

He chuckles again, glancing up at where he has her hands folded on top of each other, held down to the mattress by his. He grins, leans down low again to breathe into her ear.

“I like your hands, too,” he says, breathing out the words in a conspiratorial whisper. She releases a puff of laughter, smiling a little as he pulls back to watch her face. 

She shifts underneath him, all warmed up from his praise. There’s a growing damp spot inside her underwear, and she wants him to know. She wants him to_ see_. But when he pushes himself up from the bed, she has to fight down the creeping disappointment over the fact that their encounter didn’t escalate further. She doesn’t know exactly what she wanted to happen—she doesn’t think she’s ready for sex, and maybe he senses that—but she knows she wanted more.

She is _always _wanting more.

Despite the ease at which she is able to approach him now, the ease at which she can put her hands on him, invite herself into his space, she still finds it difficult to initiate things beyond their usual playful encounters—encounters that are innocent, mostly—when what she really wants is for him to touch her again like he had the night that everything changed. She wants it. Thinks about it constantly. But she can’t bring herself to ask for it, can’t bring herself to voice her need. She is still so afraid of his rejection, somehow paranoid that her orgasm from that night was a fluke, a one-time deal, that he won’t want to bring her to climax again. It’s her worst fear.

And the idea of sex terrifies her, even though she wants it. She knows she does. But sometimes she still has nightmares about Nathan and all the things he used to do to her, terrifying recreations her subconscious mind is all too delighted to remind her of, feeding her images and sounds she’s tried so hard to forget.

Sometimes when she dreams of that abandoned gas station in the woods and the back seat of Nathan’s car, her dreams are so vivid she can feel his hands on her back, nails digging into her skin as he holds her down, the leather seats pulling at her sweat-slicked skin. She can feel the vicious, brutal snapping of his hips, the stranger’s hands from the other side of the car rucking up her shirt, palming her breasts. She can hear the sound of Nathan’s grunts and her own pitiful cries. And the humiliating eyes of the cellphone camera on her, when Nathan’s friend, the one who had crouched between the center console to film, had shoved it in front of her tear-streaked face and made her say, “keep going” and “please” even though she was crying, drooling onto the seats. Someone’s hands between her legs, trying to stimulate her, when all she felt was agony. The squeak of leather as bodies shifted and they all switched places, so the three of them could take turns brutalizing her.

She’s relived the sensation of being torn apart from the inside over, and over, and over again.

She knows it’ll be different with Mr. J. She knows that. But she’s also afraid of the pervasiveness of her own memory, afraid of the stain Nathan’s left behind.

Her body’s never really been her own, and she knows that, but she’s scared she might be broken—shattered beyond repair—and that Mr. J will have no use for her then. What good is she to him if she can’t give him this part of her? If she can’t give him _all _of her?

Still, she does everything she can to show her appreciation, to demonstrate how eager she is to please.

She cooks something for the two of them almost every night, excited by the prospect of pleasing him with how good she’s gotten at it. She scours through recipes on her phone and tries to find ones she thinks Mr. J would like. He always cuffs her chin and tells her it’s _delicious _afterwards—saying it in a way that makes her cheeks flush—and she’s starting to think he’d eat just about anything she’d cook, just because she was the one to make it. Something about that makes her heart flutter.

And despite her fears, despite her reservations, she’s growing a little bolder every day.

She thinks Mr. J likes it.

They are sprawled out on the couch together. It’s a hazy, skin-slick afternoon, her skin glistening with a thin sheen of sweat even though she hasn’t done anything to warrant it. The ceiling fan spins slowly overhead, providing little relief. The blinds are drawn shut in all the windows, glowing like they’re on fire, golden yellow and warm to the touch from being battered by the sun. It’s so hot, the kind of sluggish heat that makes her feel sun-drunk and sleepy. The kind that makes her irritated. Restless.

She is lying on the opposite end of the couch, next to the sagging A/C unit that protrudes from the window like a big, bloated belly. The inside of her cast itches like crazy. She’s stuck a pencil down there a couple of times even though she knows she shouldn’t.

She keeps thinking about the way Mr. J had laid her across his thighs that night, the feel of his hot fingers sliding between her legs, the way they’d felt inside of her. Her slick all over his pants, the way she had begged for him, and how it had felt to clench around his fingers as he curled them inside her. She bears down on nothing as she thinks about it, squeezing her thighs together, and she wants that pressure again, wants his hands on her. Inside her. 

She wants so badly to allow herself to let _go_. Crawl into his lap. Straddle his thighs and put her hands on his chest. Tell him just how much she wants to be touched by him again. Anxiety curls in her lower belly, though, warping alongside her arousal, and she knows she can’t bring herself to tell him. Not yet. 

Instead, she allows her t-shirt to ride up when she stretches her arms over her head and stands, exposing her bare thighs to him, a little peek of her pink underwear. Too hot for shorts today.

She glides past him without saying anything—feeling his burning eyes on her back as she goes—and sashays to her bedroom. Shuts the door.

She lays down on her old bed, on top of the covers. She’s a little nervous, but her underwear is already soaked when she peels them off. She’s needed this. She hikes up her shirt so her belly and ribs are exposed. Bends her knees in that way she likes and spreads her thighs. Slides a hand down between her legs in a way she is well-familiarized with, now. 

The camera’s still in here, somewhere. She knows it is.

She tries to start off slow, but the edge of pleasure approaches faster than she anticipated. Her anxiety fizzles away, dissolving into nothing, like it was never even there. It’s been almost two weeks since he touched her, and she’s been so pent up. It doesn’t take long. The thought of him watching makes her heart thud wildly. 

Is he watching right now?

She chases the fantasy as far as she can, imagines him throwing open her door, her surprised gasp when he stalks to the bed, crouching down low over her, grasping her wrist and yanking it out from between her thighs. Growling, “_You just couldn’t wait, could you_?” and then taking her fingers into his mouth, sucking them clean, laving his tongue all over them in a way that is _obscene_. Releasing her fingers from his mouth with a wet pop, maybe a little breathless when he says, “_I couldn’t either_,” as he crawls over her, finishes her off himself just like he did that night. 

She comes to that tantalizing thought, stars the color of day-old bruises bursting behind her closed lids, her toes curling as she bites off a choked cry that she knows he must hear.

She lays there and pants as she comes down, absently trailing the tips of her wet fingers over the bare, soft skin of her tummy. After, she shimmies her underwear back up her thighs and slips out into the living room.

It’s ridiculous—she should feel ashamed—but all she feels is wanton and hot, like an animal in heat, like she’s preening for him or something. Fluffing up her feathers, crying out for him with a special mating call that resonates at a frequency only he can hear. She’s done everything but get down on all fours to present herself, and even then she thinks about what it would feel like to do that, how good it would feel to have his fingers sliding reverently over the knobs of her arched spine. How willingly she would debase herself for him.

In the absence of shame, she tastes only desire, and she lays herself down at the foot of its altar, clothes herself in the metanoia that only the power of his touch can inspire. 

In the living room, she resumes her earlier spot on the couch, perfectly innocent, and she bites her lip when she sees his phone lying next to him, face up. Screen dark. That wasn’t there before.

Her eyes trail up to search his face, and her heart stutters to an abrupt stop when she finds his dark eyes already on her, boring into her, like he can see straight through her to the other side. She can’t read his expression—what is he thinking?—and she folds her arms across her abdomen like she could close herself off from the penetration of his gaze.

The TV drones on in the background, forgotten.

“Did you, uh, want to_ ask_ me for something, princess?” The way he hisses the word ‘princess’—full of saccharine sweetness, the kind that is only ever full of malice—makes the hairs on her arms stand on end. 

She shakes her head ‘no’—probably too quickly, she thinks—and then searches his eyes.

He doesn’t say anything in response, but before he looks away, returning back to the TV, she swears his gaze flickers down, to the place between her thighs, just for a second.

She catches the twitch in his jaw, and then his arm is around her a moment later, pulling her against him, and something about it feels deliciously territorial, like he_ has_ to have her close. And even though it’s hot, even though they’ll both be sweating in a couple of minutes, she snuggles under the crook of his arm and curls her legs up underneath her, lays her head down on his chest. She bites down on her secret smile.

* * *

It feels so good to be wanted.

Mr. J lets her return back to work not long after. She didn’t even have to ask. It surprises her, him allowing her this freedom after she so carelessly abused it, but she’s grateful for the opportunity to prove herself, for this second chance. No mistakes this time.

She doesn’t know where Ben fits into all of this, whether there’s room for a friendship with him now that she’s with Mr. J—like, _officially_—but she thinks she can make it work. Mr. J can trust her now, now that the two of them are together. He doesn’t have to worry about Ben.

She _is_ excited to see him, though, bouncing her knee on the bus, headphones plugged into her phone, her music pitched at a respectful volume so the old woman snoring softly next to her—chin to chest—doesn’t hear. She figured out how to download music onto her phone last week, and she’s _obsessed_. Songs suddenly carry new weight—a heightened significance—now that she has someone she loves to associate them with.

_Love. _

Her toes curl inside her shoes when she thinks about it.

She redirects her focus back to Ben, how eager she is to tell him that everything’s okay now, that her and her ‘uncle’ have worked everything out. She can’t wait to tell him how happy she is. How everything is perfect now. Ben doesn’t have to be mad anymore on her behalf.

She tucks her headphones carefully inside her backpack as the bus slows to a stop. Mr. J got them for her—they’re the really fancy kind—and sound cancelling. Sometimes when she’s wearing them, she doesn’t even realize that he’s come home. She’ll look up to find him standing in the doorway, staring, as she lays on her belly on their bed and flips through a magazine or plays on her phone. One time he came home when she was jumping on the bed, dancing and singing to herself, and it was _several_ long moments before she noticed him, leaning up against the doorframe, smirking, and she immediately ripped her headphones off so they dangled around her neck, her face so hot.

“Well, don’t stop on _my_ account,” he’d said. He made a shooing gesture with his hands as if to say _keep going_, but she got down off the bed and couldn’t meet his gaze for the rest of the night, not until he’d cornered her in the hallway before bed, gently pushing her up against the wall, murmuring, “It was _cute_, baby,” winding a strand of her hair around his finger, and she swears she was flying so high she saw stars all night long, even in her dreams.

She shoulders her backpack as she skips the last step to jump off the bus. She’s missed the diner. It’s been four weeks since the accident. Four amazing, blissful weeks Just her and Mr. J. But she misses her coworkers, and Ben sneaking her the leftover fries at the end of the night—the extra crispy ones at the bottom of the fryer—and sitting out back with him during their lunch breaks. And she misses the warmth of glowing neon and the checkered floors and the friendly little jingle of the old fashioned cash register as it opens and closes. She misses the little old man who comes in every Sunday morning and sits in the same booth and orders the same thing, who looks so longingly at the empty seat across from his that she just knows that’s where his wife used to sit.

The overhead bell chimes when she enters, familiar and welcoming, and she waves to Peggy and then to Miranda, one of the college girls whose face brightens when she sees her. Miranda sidles up to her, balancing a heavy tray on her shoulder with one hand.

“Hey, look who’s back!” she exclaims. Her cheeks are rosy with her blush, her glitter eyeshadow an electric shade of blue and green. She reminds Taylor of those girls she’s seen on Instagram and Youtube, the ones who buy all that really fancy makeup and then show you how to put it on. She likes watching those sometimes. Taylor stares for a moment at the pendent on the silver chain of her necklace—a black spider—as it winks at her in the sunlight streaming in through the front windows. “We’ve been swamped without you,” Miranda says. “Doc said it was okay for you to work with that thing?” she asks, nodding to Taylor’s cast.

Taylor nods eagerly. The doctor never really said—or maybe he did—but the memory of that night prior to Mr. J touching her is all kind of a blur now. Maybe it was the medicine they gave her at the hospital that made her forget.

Miranda says something else, but Taylor is too busy looking over the girl’s shoulder, trying to see through the two porthole windows on the swinging doors that lead into the kitchen. Trying to see Ben.

She chirps something else that Taylor doesn’t catch, the older girl distracted by a customer, and Taylor is free to slip away. On her way to the kitchen, she waves again at Peggy, but Peggy only offers a small, tight smile in return before she is hurrying off to check on one of her tables. Taylor frowns at this—Peggy is normally a bit more animated—but maybe she’s just having a bad day.

She bites her lip as she pushes open one of the doors leading to the kitchen. Her heart leaps at seeing Ben, and he turns around at just that moment, as if he had sensed her there. Her face lights up, eyes crinkling with her smile, but before she can take another step, before she can even say anything in greeting, a big, heavy hand settles on her shoulder from behind, stopping her in her tracks.

Ben immediately turns away, ducks his head and sinks his gloved hands back into the depths of the sink, scrubbing furiously at the inside of an oversized pot. 

The hand releases her a moment later, and she turns, wide-eyed and confused, as she stares up into the eyes of a man she’s never seen before.

She knows immediately that it’s Hank.

“Taylor,” he says warmly. His voice is rich—deeper than she expected. She stares up at him with wide eyes, mouth parted. Instantly mesmerized. He’s not at all what she was expecting. “It’s so nice to finally meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.”

She wishes she could say the same, but nobody has told her anything. Not even Ben.

Hank is tall—as tall as Mr. J, even—but boxier in the shape. Large throughout the shoulders and chest, but a little fuller in the abdomen. Silvery hair—crew cut—with the lines of time etched across his forehead. Clean-shaven and square-jawed. He’s wearing a white, collared button-down tucked into pressed navy slacks. Nice, shiny black shoes. It’s a lot more professional than she would have expected.

He’s handsome in that fatherly kind of way, like sometimes when she was in middle school and she’d sit outside on the front steps and watch all the dads come to pick up their kids, their handsome smiles and nice suits, their briefcases laid carefully in the backseat. The way they’d get out of the car to greet their kid, lay a hand on their shoulder and ask how their day was, and what’d they learn? 

One time she’d overheard the girls in the locker room talking about their gym teacher, Mr. Hayes, and how hot he was, how they wished he could be their dad.

“I _bet_ you wish he was your dad,” Lauren Wilcox had smirked, looking at her friend. Then one of the other girls moaned, “Ooh, _daddy_,”—a parody of a moment awash in ecstasy—and all the girls laughed. Taylor’s cheeks had flushed beet red in shame even though she didn’t really understand the allure of the fantasy. She just knew it was taboo. Wrong.

She thinks she gets it now. 

She bites down on her lip in lieu of closing it. Ruby is standing behind him—she hadn’t even noticed her until now—staring at her in a way that makes Taylor’s cheeks feel hot. 

“It’s—it’s nice to meet you too,” she says, feeling a little off-balance, perhaps even starstruck. She offers her hand then, unsure of what else to do, and Hank smiles. It’s a handsome smile, an old-fashioned one, charming and confident, like the ones old black and white movie stars used to flash. Megawatt. Full of charisma, like he knows exactly the effect he has on people.

He takes her hand in both of his, sandwiching it, and she gapes a little at how small her hand looks dwarfed in his.

“_Very _well-mannered,” he praises, and Taylor can’t help but flush from his approval. He has a pleased gleam in his eye as he grips her hand. “I like that in my staff.” He steps a little closer, still clasping her hands in his, and Taylor has to tilt her head back a bit to look up at him. He smells clean, crisp. Like pressed laundry and a pleasant aftershave. “Might have to work on this handshake, though. Anybody ever teach you a proper handshake? You need a good, firm grip. Let people know you mean business. You can tell a lot about a person from the way they shake your hand.”

She swallows. For some reason, she can’t look away. “What can you tell about me from mine?” she asks.

He chuckles, looks over his shoulder for a moment to smile at Ruby. “Exactly as you described her,” he says, and Taylor bites her lip, watching their exchange. What exactly did Ruby tell him about her?

When he turns back to look at her, his eyes are bright, maybe a little playful. There’s something kind of boyish about him, about the gleam in his eyes.

“You’re _soft_,” he says, and the way he says it sounds so sincere, so genuinely complimentary that she can’t help but smile a little. His words cut right through her for some reason, right down to the bone, and she doesn’t know why she’s feeling so weak-kneed, what it is about him that has her feeling so spellbound. 

In the silence that follows, Hank pats her hand before releasing it, and then he’s all business, standing up a little straighter. Shoulders pushed back. Assessing her from over the slope of his nose. Still that gleam in his eye. The kitchen feels a little quieter than it was before, like maybe everyone’s slowed down a little to watch their exchange.

“Why don’t you come into my office?” he says. “Ruby will come, too. We haven’t really had the chance to get to know each other yet, have we? I take pride in my employees—you’re family, when you’re here. That’s the environment I hope to foster. It’s important to me that you feel welcome. Like you’re at home.”

In the background, the door to the walk-in freezer slams shut, startling her out of her reverie. Her gaze slides between his and Ruby’s.

“I—my shift starts in just a few minutes,” she says, a little stupidly.

Hank chuckles, and it reverberates over her in a strange way, making goose bumps prickle over her arms for some reason. “That’s alright. This will only take a few minutes,” he assures. He’s friendly as ever as he puts his big hands on her shoulders—both hands, this time, and spins her around. “Besides, you’re with the boss now, right? What I say goes. Nothing to worry about.” He guides her out of the kitchen—past Ben—who she glances over her shoulder at as she passes. She tries to catch his gaze, not sure why she suddenly feels a little like a lamb being led to the slaughter, but Ben is determined not to look up at she passes, and she frowns at him as she’s guided out of the kitchen, feeling hurt. Why won’t he look at her? What’s wrong with him?

“Ruby’s told me you’re a hard worker,” Hank says when they’re squeezing through the narrow hallway to his office, his voice even deeper here, where it seems to reverberate off the wooden panels of the walls, where even the carpet seems eager to soak it up. “Is that true?” She briefly feels his breath on the back of her neck when he talks, and it makes her spine prickle. She hears Ruby’s soft footfalls behind them.

She nods. “Yes, sir,” she whispers.

He releases her so that he can open the door to his office, and then he holds it open for both her and Ruby, even though it’s one of those doors that will stay open on its own. He gestures with a nod of his head. Ladies first.

Taylor steps inside a little hesitantly, like she doesn’t belong. Like she shouldn’t be here. The last time she was in here was the day Ruby had hired her. It looks relatively unchanged since then. Maybe a little cleaner, like someone had taken the time to clear his desk and prepare for his arrival.

“Please, have a seat,” Hank says, gesturing to the metal fold-out chair in front of his desk. He closes the door behind him, and the room immediately feels ten times smaller than it already is. She sets her backpack on the floor and swallows as she sits, trying to pull her skirt a little lower over her thighs. The metal is ice-cold on the back of her legs, and she flinches a little, trying to perch on the edge of the chair instead. She tucks her legs neatly beneath the lip of the chair, crossing her legs at the ankle. Folds her hands in her lap as best she can. She really wishes she didn’t have this cast on. It makes her feel even more childish than usual. Small. Like she’s something fragile—easily broken.

Hank settles into his own chair, and it occurs to her how big he looks, even while sitting. His folds his hands pragmatically atop his desk, even while Ruby sashays past and perches herself on the edge of it, turned towards him, looking at Taylor from over her freckled shoulder. The polarity of their postures is almost amusing: Ruby, so slouchy and cool, casual-as-you-please, and Hank, straight-backed and poised, the sort of practiced rigidity born only from prior military service.

She eyes the two of them uncertainly, hoping they can’t sense her unease.

“It’s important to me that my staff works hard, you know. I demand one-hundred percent. Always. In this kind of business, you can’t afford to foster indolence, people who don’t pull their weight. I’m sure you can understand.”

Taylor hands are clammy all the sudden. Is he firing her?

“I’m sorry,” she says, the panicked squeak in her voice so embarrassing, “did I do something wrong? Are you firing me?”

Hank looks affronted that she’d ask. “No! No.” She heaves a relieved sigh without even meaning to, her shoulders relaxing. “Of course not. I have nothing but admiration for your work ethic. As I said, Ruby has told me all about you. She’s spoken very highly. She’s kind of my right-hand man,” he says, chuckling a little, bumping his knuckles against her thigh in a gesture of affection. She thinks Ruby rolls her eyes, but she can’t be sure. “She runs the show when I’m not here. I’d trust her with my life.”

Taylor nods. Hank goes on. 

“As I was saying, I admire your work ethic. I prioritize running a tight ship—and a ship is only as good as its crew.”

She nods, shifting in her seat a little. Where is he going with this?

“As captain of this ship—if you’ll pardon the continued metaphor—I also demand a certain level of respect, and a captain not respected by his crew can almost always anticipate a mutiny. Do you know what that is?”

Taylor nods. She read Treasure Island in eighth grade—well, most of it, anyway.

“A captain wishes to avoid a mutiny, if at all possible. He works to keep his crew happy. Satisfied. Well-fed and well compensated. Do you follow?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sir.” Hank smiles. “I like that.” He pauses to lean back a little, relaxing some. “You know, I’m retired military. First Lieutenant of the 24th Infantry Division. Desert Storm in ’91—before you were even born.” He pauses, shakes his head a little in that way adults often do when they’re recalling the past, like they can’t help but marvel over the passage of time, all the strange ways in which it ebbs and flows. “Feels like yesterday,” he says. “I’ll never forget those oil wells they set fire to in Al-Ahmadi—flames so hot I thought my gas mask would melt right onto my face.” Her own face pinches at this—it sounds horrifying—and he goes on, shaking his head again as if to rid himself of the memory. “As I was saying, a crew respects their captain. And respect is something that comes in many different forms. I consider honesty to be paramount among them. Would you agree?”

Taylor swallows, still so unsure of where all of this is going. Doesn’t he want her to start her shift now? It was really busy out there when she came in.

“I agree,” she says, quietly.

“Good,” Hanks says, and he flashes her that warm smile again, something behind his eyes softening a little. “I don’t mean to frighten you, Taylor. I simply want us all to be on the same page. That’s important in a family, that we all see eye to eye.”

She nods again. She feels like she’s being controlled by a ventriloquist with all the head-bobbing she’s doing. She wipes her clammy hands off on the outside of her thighs.

“Where was I? Oh, yes. Honesty. Very important to a captain running a tight ship. Very important that his crew is honest. _Respectful_.” He pauses for a moment to look at her—really look at her—and she squirms a little in her seat. His eyes narrow. “You respect me, don’t you?”

She nods quickly, squeezing her hands between her thighs, sitting up a little straighter. “Yes, sir. Yes.”

“Good,” he says. He nods. “That’s very good.” He unfolds his hands, and she follows his movements as he leans back in his chair, gripping the armrests, looking even more intimating than before. “Keeping this in mind, then,” he says, glancing briefly at Ruby, who has taken to studying her cuticles, “is there anything you’d like to tell me? Anything you might have been… dishonest about?” 

Taylor pales, suddenly.

Oh, God.

Her eyes betray her—she can’t help it—her gaze darting desperately to the tall filing cabinet on Ruby’s left-hand side. She swallows. Looks back at Hank, where he is studying her closely.

“If this is about my address—”

Hank’s brows shoot up. “Is it?”

Taylor’s mouth parts, her eyes darting helplessly between the two of them. She can’t help but feel like she just put her foot in her mouth—but maybe that’s exactly what he wanted.

It’s pathetic—_soft_—but her throat tightens suddenly, and before she knows it, tears are pricking at her eyes. She’s so fucking scared. She doesn’t want to get fired.

“I—I’m sorry—” she chokes. “I didn’t—I didn’t mean to lie—”

Hank _tsks_, sympathetic, and this time Taylor _knows_ Ruby rolls her eyes, she can see it even through the blur of her tears.

Taylor lowers her head, wipes desperately at her tears with the back of her forearm. In her peripheral, she sees Hank shift, but she doesn’t register that he’s right in front of her until she looks up, where he’s perched on the edge of the desk, his legs crossed at the ankle. Ruby moves to take up residence in his former seat, still examining her cuticles as if they hold all the Earth’s greatest secrets.

“Taylor, there’s no need to cry. I’m not angry.”

She sniffles. “You’re not?”

“Of course not. Nobody lies without cause,” he says. “Surely you must’ve had a reason for putting down that address.”

She sniffles again. Licks the taste of salt off her lips.

When she doesn’t respond, he prods her further. “We’re family now, Taylor, and family take care of each other. If you’re not…_ safe…_ where you are,” he says, selecting the word carefully, “I have the resources necessary to take care of that.”

Her head shoots up at breakneck speed—afraid, suddenly. “What do you mean?”

Hank chuckles at her panicked expression. “Nothing unsavory,” he promises.

“I—I am safe,” she sniffles, after a prolonged moment of silence has passed. God. The last thing she needs them to know about is Mr. J. Not when everything is finally where it’s supposed to be. Not when she’s so close to having him all to herself. All of him. “I promise I am.” She tries to straighten some, but she finds she doesn’t have the strength.

She pulls back slightly when Hank pushes himself off the desk, and then he’s on the floor in front of her, kneeling down on one knee. He rests his forearm on his thigh, his hands clasped together. He looks resigned. Sad. Like he’s about to tell her the truth about Santa or something. 

But their eyes are level now, and she searches his, surprised by the gentle, calming shade of blue she finds there. Mr. J says she’s a bad liar—but she remembers the advice he gave her about how telling a convincing is all in the eyes, in the things you don’t say—and she tries to school her features into something cool. Collected.

“Are you?” he prompts. “Safe?” He shifts a little closer, lowers his head some, looking up at her from under his brows like Mr. J does sometimes. “Because I’m not so sure that’s the same story I heard from Ben.”

Taylor’s eyes flash, and her heart pulses sharply. Fear clouds over as she looks at him. Her mouth bone dry. “W—what?”

“I _said_, I’m not sure that’s the same story I heard from Ben. Something about an uncle, I think? Is that right?”

Taylor shifts back in her chair some—this is _not _good, she knows this know—but Hank follows after her, crouching in front of her now, still on one knee as he moves to grip the edges of her seat, his arms braced on either side of her thighs, caging her in. She squeezes her thighs so tightly together her legs tremble from the strain.

His eyes are still so soft. Sad. “Taylor. I’m afraid you’re not… _understanding _me—”

“It’s better now,” she blurts. Her knuckles are digging into her thighs, where she grips the hem of her skirt with a vice. “I—I am safe now. I promise. I worked things out with my uncle. I was upset when I talked to Ben. I told him things that weren’t true. I just—I wanted him to feel sorry for me….” She bites her lip, forces herself to maintain eye contact with him even though every single instinct inside of her screams for her to look away. His eyes are so blue, the color of arctic ice, and yet somehow they still burn her.

Hank seems to study her for a long moment, and then his eyes drift down. She watches him study the hilltops of her knees—can feel the warm exhale of his breath there as she waits—taut as a steel wire.

“You’re a good girl, aren’t you, Taylor?”

She looks up to meet his gaze. “What?” she breathes.

“A good _girl_,” he emphasizes. His blue eyes are hard now. Unblinking. “Obedient. Well-behaved. You’re not used to having to tell a lie, but when you’re threatened—when the lie is told out of protection for another—then it becomes necessity, doesn’t it?” Taylor swallows. How could he possibly know this about her? “It’s part of our evolutionary design,” he says. “Our survival instincts. What we’re_ built_ for.”

Taylor’s eyes dart desperately to Ruby’s, seeking help—an out, _anything_—but the woman offers her no such reprieve. She has her long, tanned legs crossed at the ankles, propped on the desk, and whatever signals Taylor is trying to send with her eyes go completely unnoticed. Why is Ruby even here if she’s not going to say anything?

“Maybe,” Hank says, drawing her attention back to him, “our problem is that we just need to get to know each other better. Families have to establish _trust_, after all.”

She draws her shoulders up to her ears, traps her hands between her thighs again, trying to make herself smaller. 

“Do you want to get to know each other better, Taylor?”

Her gaze slides past Hank to look at Ruby once again, and she withers suddenly at the way Ruby is staring at her, looking at her for the first time since they came in here. Ruby’s gaze is hard. Predatory. Taylor squirms and tries not to show her discomfort. She should say no—she _wants_ to say no—but she’s scared of what might happen if she does.

“Does this hurt?”

She follows Hank’s gaze to her cast. Without meaning to, she draws it up to her abdomen, laying her hand over it, almost as if out of protective instinct. She shrugs, half-hearted.

“It’s okay,” she says quietly, a little tremble in her voice.

“That must have been frightening, the car accident. Going to the hospital. You’re very brave.”

She nods in agreement. So they do know about the car accident. Did Ben tell them, or did they find out some other way?

“You know, I’m throwing a little _fête _this weekend—just something to show my appreciation for my employees. It might surprise you to know this isn’t my only business venture. I manage several investments throughout the city.”

Taylor’s eyes widen a little, surprised to hear this. Maybe that’s why he’s never around much?

“Travel keeps me occupied,” he says, as if reading her mind, “but I like to remind everyone I’m still overseeing my operations—and that their work is valued. _Your _work is valued,” he emphasizes. 

He stops here, and Taylor knows he’s waiting for her response. She swallows to urge more moisture back into her mouth. Her face feels tight from where her tear tracks have dried on her cheeks.

“I—I’ll have to ask first,” she says, hating how small she sounds when she says it.

Hank smiles—like he’s amused by this—and his eyes crinkle at the corners when he does. “There’s no need,” he says, so light, like the matter has already been settled. “You’ll be paid to come. Think of it as just another shift.”

“Oh—okay.”

“Good,” he says. He releases her chair—she feels like she can breathe, finally—and stands. “Ruby will make sure you have all the details. Oh, and,” he leans briefly on his desk, supporting his weight with one arm, “Ben will bring you. Easier that way. I wouldn’t want you arriving late. You can never rely on public transportation these days.”

“But—but I—”

Hank turns to look at her. “Is that a problem?”

_Yes!_ she wants to say. She doesn’t want to be in a car with Ben. She doesn’t even want to look at him. He betrayed her—he told Hank about Mr. J. How could he _do_ that to her? She had told him those things in confidence. She thought… she thought she could trust him.

Even though her aversion is clearly written all over her face—in the crease between her brows, the downward pull of her mouth—she shakes her head. “No, sir.”

Hank smiles again. “That’s a good girl.”

She doesn’t say anything in response, taking this as her cue to stand, only, when she does, her knees feel week—Jell-O-ish—and she has to reach out for the back of the chair to steady herself. She looks up to catch Ruby’s knowing smirk from behind the desk, and Taylor flushes in embarrassment despite herself. She’s filled with hatred for Ruby suddenly—a feeling that comes on so hotly she knows she’ll feel guilty about it later—but in the moment, the intensity of her hatred is nearly blinding. She feels patronized by her, betrayed, like Ruby was just sitting there the whole time, watching while she struggled to tread water, watching while she cried, while the sharks circled. Watching while she was drowned, and then eaten.

She retrieves her backpack from the floor, and then Hank’s hand is on her lower back when he sees her to the door. She looks back over her shoulder at Ruby for a moment, who has already unbuttoned the first few buttons of her top, and is shaking her hair out the bun she’d had it tied in. Taylor frowns as she’s led out into the hallway, her cheeks turning hot again, and an understanding washes over her. Are they really going to—? After Hank had just cornered her into coming to his party? After she just sat there and_ cried_?

“I’m glad we could have this talk, Taylor,” Hank says. 

She hugs her arms across her abdomen, clutching her backpack to her as if it were a shield. She feels cold, suddenly, now that she’s out of the office. He walks her into the breakroom, stopping just short of it to regard her when she turns around to face him.

“Yes,” she says, trying not to think about whatever is about to transpire between him and Ruby in his office. Trying not thing think about _why_. “Me too.”

* * *

After he leaves, and the door to his office closes with a firm click, Taylor allows herself a moment to collect herself before returning to work. She takes her backpack and gently squeezes it into her locker—she doesn’t want to squish her headphones—and tries not to think about what’s going on behind that closed door. Her movements feel sluggish and slow. Faraway, almost, like she’s not really here.

She closes her locker gently, lets her hand slide down the cool metal until it drops back down to her side, lifeless.

Her conversation with Hank swims around in her head, like a buoy bobbing aimlessly in open water. So much information, she doesn’t even know where to start, what to attempt to masticate and digest first. What to think.

She feels—she feels _angry_. Angry at Ruby. At _Ben_.

How could Ben tell Hank about all the secret stuff she’d told him? Didn’t he know that was only ever meant for the two of them?

She angrily wipes at the tear that slips down her cheek. Peels the elastic band off her wrist and ties up her hair in a high ponytail, the ends of which dusts between the backs of her shoulder blades. Ben’s a jerk for doing what he did. And to think that she was excited to see him. All she wants to do now is go home and be with Mr. J. Curl up in his embrace, let him hold her. They can order take-out and watch a movie and then she’ll fall asleep in his lap while he strokes his fingers up and down her back. And then he’ll carry her to bed, lay her down on top of the covers. Maybe he’ll lean down and brush his lips against her forehead, tell her that everything’s going to be alright, before she drifts back to sleep.

She sniffles. Smooths out her skirt. Whatever. She’s just going to ignore Ben. It doesn’t matter.

Except, when she enters the kitchen, his eyes are all over her, wide and searching, and it’s tempting to give in and look, but she doesn’t. She feels proud of herself for the way she doesn’t even glance in his direction as she walks past, forcing her shoulders back, holding her head up. She knows he stares after her as she pushes through the double doors and heads out into the diner. That’s fine. Let him stare. 

It’s a busy shift, which is good—Miranda tells her it’s always busy when Hank is in the house—and it keeps her pretty distracted. She goes back and forth between being hostess and bussing tables, and every time she drops off the square bucket of dirty dishes into the kitchen, she doesn’t look at Ben when she does, even when he says, “Taylor, wait—” and tries to tell her he just wants to talk. It feels good to blow him off—empowering—like he’s getting what he deserves.

Hank is out on the floor a little while later, making the rounds with the regulars, crouching down low to ask how the food is, making strong eye contact with everyone in a way that makes her shiver, for some reason, even when she watches him do it from across the room. People seem to be just as entranced by him as she is, something about the way he commands attention, the way he carries himself.

He gives good-natured back-pats and firm handshakes and throws his head back when he laughs, and she can’t help but track him everywhere he goes, watch every little thing he does. He places his hand on the back of someone’s booth or chair when they’re talking, leans down a little so they know he has their full attention. He’s the kind of man who nods respectfully to show he’s listening, to communicate his interest, and sometimes he touches his hand to his jaw, strokes it thoughtfully with his fingertips, just for a moment, as if he has to coax the words out of his mouth, and then he’s talking, and everyone listens with rapt attention. He’s a good storyteller, that much she knows. She watches him from the hostess stand as he recounts different anecdotes from the various colors of his life—and there are so many. Watches him gesture widely, painting an entire canvas with just his words and the sweeping brushstrokes of his hands.

Later, a customer comes in with her seven month-old baby, and when Hank asks if he can have the honors of holding her, the mother is delighted and flattered that he would ask. She hands the baby over to him and is positively glowing as she watches him cradle her child.

There’s something about the exchange that makes Taylor uneasy—perhaps how willing the mother is to hand over her newborn to a complete stranger, even if they are in the company of a full house and several watchful eyes—or perhaps it’s because she’s jealous, because she never had a mother or a father to dote on her the way Hank is doting on that baby right now. He cradles her in both arms, holding her so tenderly, like she’s the most precious thing in the entire world, like her wealth is unparalleled. She watches him stroke a finger down the baby’s soft, chubby cheek, and something about that makes her want to cry, makes her throat feel tight and her chest ache. She’s never been loved like that. She’s never been loved the way babies are loved—unconditionally—without anything expected from them in return. She has only ever been used to the kind of love that comes with conditions attached, a laundry-list of stipulations and requirements, and that is a half love, a fake love.

She thinks back to what Hank said earlier, _we’re family now, Taylor, and family take care of each other, _and she has to work to swallow down the sour burn of bile that crawls up her esophagus.

What is family to an orphan? What is family to a girl who’s never, _ever _been wanted by one? 

She takes her lunch break a little later than usual. Miranda forces her to go when the dinner rush slows down a little bit, and Taylor is exhausted by the time she finally gets to sit down. Having Hank on the floor has made her even more stressed than usual, and Peggy has been treating her weird and Ruby has barely said more than two words than her, and between all that and her insistence to ignore Ben, she’s completely drained by the time she collects her lunch from her locker. Peanut butter and marshmallow fluff smushed between two slices of stale white bread, a handful of pretzels. Sometimes she’ll buy a cheeseburger and fries, but they only get a fifteen percent discount, and she’s trying to be better about saving her money. She wants an art easel and some of those really fancy paints. She’s been itching to try a new medium, tired of the familiar strokes of her pencils, and she’s been fantasizing about how different holding a paintbrush will feel. She thinks it’ll be messier—liberating—the liquid strokes of a paintbrush, the way she will allow colors to bleed instead blend. She wants to capture the exact shade of Mr. J’s red mouth. His acidic black eyes.

She sits on the sun-dried stack of pallets out back and chews on her sandwich slowly, trying to make it last. The wood is rough and warm beneath her bare thighs, and a splinter is digging into her ass, but she shifts and ignores it. The bruises aren’t as sore and tender as they used to be. She swings her legs and stares at the ground, enjoying the warmth of the setting sun on her skin, all the hairs on her arm prickling under the sun’s rays after having been inside under the air conditioning all day. She sighs, thinking about Mr. J and how much she just wants to go home. Today has gone nothing like she expected. 

She takes out her phone and decides to send him a text message.

_7:53_

_hi_

She munches on her pretzels and impatiently waits for a response. Sends another text.

_7:55_

_i miss you_

When her phone vibrates with his reply a few minutes later, she bites down on her lip, smiling.

_8:02_

_Thinking about me? _

She’s smiling as she types out her reply. She should say ‘yes’, but another part of her itches to type ‘always’.

The door to her right is thrown open suddenly, hitting the wall behind it, and she puts down her phone just in time to catch Ben bursting through the door.

“We need to talk.”

The door swings shut behind him, and a waft of cold air swooshes out right before it closes, momentarily chilling her. She knows it’s petulant, probably a little childish, but she puts her phone down so she can cross her arms, turning the other away, towards the open mouth of the alley.

“I don’t have anything to say to you.”

She hears his sneakers crunching through the loose gravel as he approaches. “Taylor, come on, please just let me explain—”

She scoots off the stack of pallets, brushing off her skirt, packing up her trash. She was finished eating anyway.

“_Hey_—” Taylor’s heart pulses in her throat when he reaches out and grabs her forearm, his big hand encircling it completely. It reminds her of the game that some of the girls would play in gym, sometimes, sitting on the bleachers and giggling, taking their middle finger and thumb and using it to circle their wrists. The way they’d climb up their forearms with those circled digits until their fingers finally broke apart. That was how many kids you were supposedly going to have when you got married. Taylor could do it eight times.

Ben’s grip hurts where he holds her, and she almost is tempted to ask, _you want to break this wrist, too? _

“Will you cut it out?” he snaps. “You’re acting like a child."

“Well you’re acting like a _jerk_!” She rips her arm out of his grasp. “How could you tell them about my uncle?” she cries. “I trusted you!”

“I know. I _know_ that. I’m sorry, okay? But all that shit you told me… I was worried. What was I supposed to do?”

“You were _supposed_ to not say anything—”

“Oh, yeah?” Ben’s face is hardening, his brows furrowing together. He steps closer, so she has to tilt her head back to look up at him. “And when you show up to work with all that shit on the back of your thighs? Am I supposed to not say anything about that, too?”

Taylor’s face burns hot with embarrassment. She didn’t think anybody could see that. “That’s _none_ of your business.”

“Like fuck it isn’t. Jesus.” Ben throws up his hands, clearly exasperated with her, and she thinks, _good_, as her nostrils flare. It feels good to be angry. It feels_ right_. Ben shakes his head, and then he’s pushing a hand through his hair. “I care about you, Taylor. Can’t you fucking see that?”

His admission startles her, and for a moment she can only stare at him as some of her heat slowly begins to fade. Her shoulders sag, and she feels deflated, suddenly, like all the air’s been sucked out of her.

“I trusted you,” she whispers. She can’t look at him when she says it. “How could you do that to me? I was so _embarrassed_—”

“I was worried about you.”

“Well, you don’t have to be.” She scratches her fingernails against the hard shell of her cast, a new, anxious habit. She likes the sound it makes. “Everything is fine now. I—I talked to my uncle. Everything is fine.”

“Okay,” he says, a little defensive. “Okay. Good.” Ben’s shoes shift in the gravel, and the sun dips a little lower. Somehow they always find themselves out here during golden hour. He stuffs his hands in the pockets of his jeans, clearly as uncomfortable as she is. “Can’t we just forget about this?”

Taylor sighs. She glances over her shoulder for a moment, looking at nothing but needing to look away, squinting against the setting sun, so warm and comforting all up and down her back.

“Hank says you’re supposed to take me to a party on Saturday,” she says after a minute. “You get a new car already?”

Ben chuckles, looking relieved that she’s opted for this out. “Nah. He’s gonna let me borrow one of his. He gets them cheap from one of those used car lots. Got a thing with the owner, I guess.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Ben is looking at her in a way that makes her feel all blushy, for some reason, and she folds her arms across her abdomen as she looks up at him.

“What?” she asks, a little hotly.

He smiles. “Nothing. It’s just really good to see you. It was boring without you here.”

The corner of her mouth lifts some, secretly pleased. “Yeah?”

“No one appreciates my impressions like you do.”

“_Someone_ has to laugh at your jokes.”

Ben chuckles, and she smiles a little, too. He peels his apron over his head and sits down on the stack of pallets. When he asks about her arm, she sits next to him, lets him touch her cast as he laments how he never got to draw anything on it.

“Maybe you can later,” she says, hopeful, and Ben looks at her almost a little sadly, but she doesn’t understand why.

They both head inside together when her break is over, and as Ben returns back to the kitchen and she tucks her phone inside her locker, her heart somersaults when she sees the notification for an unread message.

_8:07_

_I’m thinking about you, too._

* * *

It’s dark when she gets home, and she’s exhausted. She waited over thirty minutes for the bus with Ben, and when it never came, he walked her to the subway station instead. The closest she can get to home is where the subway dumps her out on Edgar Street, which is a thirty minute walk from home. It’s tempting to ask Mr. J if he can come for her, but she’s half afraid he’ll send Ressling instead, so she doesn’t. She walks fast, trying not to draw too much attention to herself even though the streets are mostly empty. It’s hot, too, the night humid and black, the sound of cicadas and other night things growing louder the closer she gets to their neighborhood. She watches a little bat flutter beneath the pale, washed-out light of a streetlamp, and she scrunches up her nose. Bats freak her out. One of her foster families had some in the attic, and she could hear them flapping their wings at night when she was lying in bed, trying to sleep. It makes her skin prickle just to think about it. She walks a little faster and brushes the sweat-slicked hair off her forehead, exhaling a puff of air. Her shirt is damp and clinging to her lower back and under her arms, and she can’t wait to shower.

She sighs into the cool relief of the air conditioning when she opens the front door, slides her backpack off her shoulders. Most of the lights are off, and she finds Mr. J at his desk when she crosses the threshold to their bedroom. He’s standing, hunched over, hands propped on the edges of the desk to support his weight. There’s a halo of light surrounding him from the low-bent gooseneck lamp as he looks down at whatever has his attention. She drags her feet across the carpet towards him and throws her arms around him from behind, pressing herself up against his back. Sighing.

“Mm,” he hums, turning his head to look at her from over his shoulder. “Miss me?” His voice sounds low. Gravelly. It sends a shiver of goose bumps scuttling down her spine. 

“Today _sucked_,” she mumbles. She nuzzles her face into his back, squeezes her arms a little tighter around the hard plane of his abdomen. He’s wearing a white t-shirt tucked into his purple slacks, his suspenders dangling around thighs. She inhales the smell of his skin, sweat and salt and blackened smoke.

He peels her arms off of him so he can turn around, and then she’s squealing in surprise when he lifts her from under her arms, sets her on the edge of his desk so her legs are dangling. He picks her up as if she weighs nothing, and it makes her heart flutter, especially when he steps between her thighs. Her lips part when he cups her face in both hands, stroking his thumbs along her cheeks.

“Poor _honey_,” he coos, that nasal lilt to his voice, “why don’t you tell Mr. J all about it?”

Her eyes drift down to his mouth, where the greasepaint is a couple days old. Faded and a little smeared. She licks her lips.

“It’s nothing,” she says. She feels hypnotized from the way he is looking at her, his thumbs stroking along her cheeks so softly.

“No?” he prods, cocking his head a little.

She hesitates. She’s not sure if she should tell him about Hank, or Ruby, or Ben. Somehow it doesn’t seem like a good idea.

“I broke a bunch of plates today,” she says, which is true. It was so embarrassing. She had been so busy staring at Hank from across the diner that she’d run straight into Peggy, making the older woman drop the stack of plates she had been carrying back to the kitchen. The sound of glass shattering had been deafening, drawing everyone’s attention, and the heat of everyone’s eyes on her had felt scalding. And the way Hank had smirked at her, like he’d known he was the reason for the mishap.

Mr. J chuckles at this, and she can’t help but smile a little with the way he is looking at her. She marvels at the feel of his bare hands on her face, the _affection_ in his eyes. All the little slivers of pale skin bleeding through the cracks in his greasepaint. Her eyes drift down to his mouth again.

“Is that all?” he prompts.

It takes her a moment before she can pull her eyes away. Gather her voice. “It was just really busy today,” she says quietly, and he nods in understanding, stroking his thumb a little higher, across the arch of her cheekbone. She follows his eyes, where he’s staring at the little sweat-damp curls around her forehead. Something about that must make him laugh, because he huffs out a breath, his mouth stretching into a lopsided grin, and she can’t help but preen and smile shyly under his attention. It feels so good to have him looking at her like this, she can hardly believe it’s _real_. He always makes her feel so good. So _warm_. She licks her lips. Maybe he’ll touch her again?

She dares to spread her thighs a little wider, biting her lip as her skirt rides further up, but, a second later, his hands from her face are gone, and he’s slipping away before she can even blink, his attention redirected to the mess of papers next to her.

She tries not to let her disappointment show, tries to rework her frown into the shape of something else. She scoots off the edge of the desk and has to peel some of his papers from the back of her thighs when she does.

“Sorry,” she murmurs. She places them neatly back where she found them, trying to meet his eyes, but he’s already far away, muttering to himself, his mind somewhere else.

She takes a long time in the shower, the events of the day playing on loop in her mind as the hot water rains down from overhead. Ruby and Hank. Her fight with Ben and their subsequent reconciliation. How weird Peggy treated her today. Her skin is pink and hot to the touch by the time she gets out, and she runs a brush through her wet hair while she stands in front of the mirror, staring at herself for a long time, even after she’s combed all her tangles out. She takes her time weaving her hair into a long, single braid that trails between the backs of her shoulder blades, leaving a damp circle on the back of her oversized t-shirt. 

Mr. J is sitting at his desk when she reenters, the lamp pitched a little lower than it was before so the circle of light is smaller, more concentrated where he needs it, and she slips under the covers without saying anything. She knows he doesn’t like to be bothered while he’s working, and she’d caught that familiar flash in his eyes earlier, like he’d just remembered something, or had some idea—something that couldn’t wait—and she knows better than to try and pull him away again.

She turns on her side and watches him from the bed for as long as she can, staring at his back, the way his hair curls at the nape of his neck. She’ll paint him like this when she has enough money saved for that canvas she wants, she thinks.

It’s a while later when she wakes with a sharp gasp, a breath that feels as though it’s been punched out of her. The tendrils of her nightmare are quick to fade as her eyes blink open into a room so black and so sticky-hot it’s almost hard to breathe. She shifts in bed, startled for a second by the hard heat of Mr. J behind her. She relaxes back into his embrace only a second later, his long arm draped over her waist, his hand splayed flat against her belly and ribs, bleeding so much heat onto her skin, even through the cotton barrier of her t-shirt.

It always surprises her to wake up with him crowded behind her—Mr. J sleeps so very little, sometimes going days without more than fifteen minutes of sleep—and on the nights where he does lay down with her, she relishes in the feel of his body pressed up against hers, how _clingy_ he is during sleep, his hands always on her in some way, his body pressed so tight to hers. Sometimes she’ll wake and find that their legs are tangled, and it feels_ right_, all their hard and soft edges somehow aligning just the way they’re meant to, the two of them molding so perfectly together.

This is how she knows she’s made for him.

Just him.

She whines a little as she pushes the covers off with her legs. Mr. J never sleeps under the covers—he runs too hot, plus he always sleeps with his clothes on—and she lets the sheets bunch at the end of the bed near their feet.

It’s so quiet she can hear the sound of her own breathing. The air conditioning has cycled off, and the room is sweltering, beads of sweat gathering between her breasts and under her arms, between her pressed-together thighs. Her hair still a little wet from her shower, her pillow honey-and-vanilla damp. She huffs irritably, tries to relax back into Mr. J’s embrace where her back is pressed solidly to his chest, but sleep won’t come. She feels pent up and fire-hot, like she’s on the verge of combustion.

She touches her hand to where his is pressed against her belly, and she absently trails her fingertips over the bump of his knuckles, spends a long time tracing over his long fingers with the pads of her own.

When she gently takes his hand and moves it a little lower down her stomach, it’s experimental only. She just wants to see if he wakes.

He doesn’t.

Emboldened, she pulls his hand farther down—slowly—over the apex of her thighs, and her mouth parts with the smallest exhale. His hand is so big and so hot. She waits another moment, just to make sure he’s still asleep, and then she’s dragging his hand even lower—impatient, now—laying her hand over his, forcing his fingers to curl so that he’s cupping her between her legs. She bites down on her lip and squeezes her eyes shut. Even just the pressure of his hand there is so_ good_. She presses down on his fingers with her own at the same time she cants her hips, and the sensation makes her blink back stars that are fire-bright, even in the black of their bedroom.

She knows she’s playing with gasoline—but now that she’s started, she can’t bring herself to stop.

She turns over so she’s lying flat on her stomach, pulling Mr. J’s arm with her, trapping the length of his forearm beneath her belly. He shifts some behind her, half draped over her back, now—and for a moment she’s terrified that he’s woken. She waits, holding her breath for several agonizing moments as her heart thuds anxiously against the mattress. When he doesn’t move, she releases a shuddery exhale in relief.

She has to shift to fit his hand between her thighs just where she wants it, lifting up her hips some, and then his fingers are there, just where she needs them, and she rubs herself up and down against them, circling her hips so slowly, chasing delicious friction. She uses her own hand to make his curl against her, forcing him to press harder. It doesn’t take long for her underwear to grow damp, not when his fingers are so warm trapped between her thighs, not when the palm of his hand is so calloused and rough. She exhales a puff of breath into the mattress, pushing her pillow away, lifting her shirt up some so her bare skin is pressed against his—frustrated. Needy.

There’s no room for fantasy this time, no time to orchestrate the illusion of what she thinks he would do if he were awake. There’s only pleasure, and need, and chasing after its inevitable, sweet crest. 

She rubs herself against him for a long time, but it’s not enough. She works herself into a frenzy, almost tipping over the edge before she unceremoniously slips and loses her peak, her pleasure receding until she builds it back up again to the edge. It happens again and again, and she feels possessed. Rabid. Like an animal in heat. She’s too slick. There’s not enough friction.

She stops long enough to peel off her soaked underwear, pulling it down to her knees, too impatient to take it off all the way. She shifts further up, panting as she rubs herself against the inside of his thick wrist, squeezing her thighs tight around it, and this time the pressure on her clit is just right. She clings to his forearm with one hand, uses the other to fist the sheets, pulling herself up and then back down in a way that makes her moan. The slide is perfect. She gasps softly, her cheeks so hot, the pleasure dizzying, her brows pushed together from the strain of trying to find release. She doesn’t care if he’s not sleeping anymore. She just needs this so badly.

She huffs into the sheets as she gets closer and closer. It’s kind of hard to move beneath Mr. J’s weight now—did he shift more on top of her?—but she’s so close to ecstasy it doesn’t matter. She clings to his forearm and whimpers, humping him so desperately, and when release finally shudders through her, she’s crying, open-mouthed, into the sheets.

Her eyelids are heavy as she struggles to catch her breath after, her cheek pressed to the mattress, a circle of drool cooling beneath her cheek as she blinks into the blackness of their room. Her heart thuds wildly, trying to come back down. She hears the _click-click-click_ of the air conditioning as it stutters back to life, and it washes its cool breath over her sweat-dampened skin. Mr. J’s arm trapped beneath her stomach is all slick from her excitement, but she doesn’t have the energy to move it.

Tears roll down her cheeks as the pleasure wanes. 

She cries because she knows it’s wrong, because her shame runs so rampant and so wild it pulses inside her without boundaries—fenceless—but she also cries because the pleasure is earth-shattering, and she knows that, if given the choice, she would do it all over again.

She would do it all over again in a heartbeat.

* * *

On Saturday, Ben texts her asking for her address.

She doesn’t text him back until several hours later, when she’s ready. She makes up some excuse about already being in town, that she was out running errands. He picks her up near Piedmont.

In the end, she elects not to tell Mr. J about the party. She doesn’t really know why. Maybe she’s afraid he won’t let her go. Maybe she’s afraid of the subsequent fallout of her not going when Hank takes her into his office the next day, talks to her in that soft, fatherly voice, making her cry when he tells her he’s disappointed that she can’t follow orders, when he tells her she doesn’t _respect_ him. He’s shaking his head when he fires her, and Ruby is there behind his desk, too, her eyes hot as coals, smirking, like she knew it would come to this.

No, it’s better this way. It’s just another work shift, really, that’s what Hank had said. She’s getting paid, after all, so it’s really no different. That’s what she tells herself.

She’s nervous, though, as she smooths down the pleats in her skirt and makes sure her polo is tucked in. Even though Mr. J isn’t home when she leaves, she’s still wearing her uniform, just so it won’t look suspicious when she comes homes later that night. She made sure to wash it the night before at the laundromat, so it’s nice and clean and doesn’t smell like fast food and grease. She brings a change of clothes just in case, but hopefully she won’t need them. She doesn’t want to stay long.

“Have you ever been to one of these things before?” she asks Ben, turning to look at him. He’s super intense today, she thinks, his eyes laser-focused on the road ahead, gripping the steering wheel with both hands. He’s barely turned to look at her since she got in the car. She notices the sweat beading along his brow, and the sweat-stain blooming through the pits of his grey t-shirt. Maybe he’s nervous about driving after the accident?

It’s a moment before he responds.

“Yeah, I’ve been before,” he says, quieter than usual.

“Will there be a lot of people there?”

“A few,” he mumbles.

She tries to pry him open with a few more questions, but his replies remain just as cryptic, and Taylor frowns, turning in her seat to face him.

“I can drive if you’re nervous,” she offers. “I mean, it’s been a little while, and I don’t technically have my permit, but as long as you—”

“It’s not that,” Ben interrupts. He does look at her then, briefly, his eyes softening some when he does. “It’s fine.”

Taylor bites down on her lip and shrugs back into her seat. “Okay,” she says, equally as quiet.

With the radio off, the silence between them feels magnified, but she leans back and stares out the window, trying not to let his weird mood exacerbate her anxiety. It’s a nice, sunny day—not too hot, for once—though she thinks it’s supposed to rain later. She frowns as she takes in the scenery—trees cushioned on either side of a narrow, one-lane road. Sunlight filters happily through the foliage, and kudzu is snaked around old, crooked telephone poles. The sound of crickets, even though it’s only half-passed six, and the hum of the city no longer present. It makes her nervous not to be able to hear it, not when she’s lived with the constant soundtrack of the city playing in the background for her entire life. It makes her feel far away from Mr. J. Makes her anxious.

Sunlight dances playfully over the dashboard and her bare thighs, warm and friendly, but her frown deepens when it dawns on her why she feels so unsettled.

These woods are familiar.

This is where Ben had taken her the night of the accident, isn’t it? She didn’t recognize it at first because of how different it looks in the daylight.

She turns to look at him, feeling a little panicked, suddenly, although she doesn’t know why. The car shudders and dips beneath them when the paved road falls away into loose gravel—reddish, orange dirt—and the road narrows even further, even as the trees start to open up on either side, becoming distant. 

“Hey, Ben,” she starts, “I don’t think—”

“I don’t want you to hate me,” he says suddenly, cutting her off.

Her brows pull together in confusion. “What?”

“I don’t want you to hate me. Please don’t hate me.” He’s still not looking at her when he says it, and she frowns at the way he’s clenching and unclenching his hands along the column of the steering wheel, and, okay, now she’s _really_ freaked out. Something about this just doesn’t feel right.

She leans forward in her seat, one hand braced against the dashboard and the other gripping the edge of the door.

“Ben, I—I think I want to go home now,” she says, the words getting tripped up all over her tongue in her haste to get them out. “I—I changed my mind. I don’t wanna go anymore.”

Ben shakes his head ‘no’, looking pained—conflicted—but he still won’t look at her.

What the_ fuck_ is going on?

She swallows, eyes darting around the car. “Let’s go back to your place,” she says, trying to keep her voice friendly. Light. “We can watch a movie or something,” she offers, edging closer to him to try and get his attention, “or—or you can draw on my cast, remember?”

She can hear the rising panic in her voice, but Ben only stares straight ahead, the car starting to slow some, and that’s when she sees it.

The woods open up into a large clearing, where a two-story house comes into view, nestled just along the edge of the tree line. It’s old, one of those houses clearly built in the 70’s, all faded brown wood, rain-soaked and bloated from the humidity. The front porch is large and sprawling, raised up to the second level and built on stilts. Near the side of the house, shaded by the trees, a handful of old, broken down cars, and a hodgepodge of decaying metal, old oil drums and other rusted junk. She sees a black SUV with tinted windows in the driveway, and then several men emerging from around the side of it, all of them dressed in black, three—no, five of them—in total.

The gravel shifts beneath the tires as the car comes to a stop—and then her heart plummets into her stomach as she watches the men start to approach. Her heartbeat thuds in her ears.

“I really like you, Taylor,” he says, the shudder in his voice audible. “I didn’t want to do this. You were—you were different.”

“What are you_ talking_ about?” she asks, panicked. Fear prickles all up and down her arms and legs in a way she hasn’t felt in a long time, different than the fear she felt that night of the accident, or when Mr. J handed Ressling his belt.

She unbuckles her seatbelt with trembling hands, maybe with the intent to flee, she doesn’t know, and she is breathing hard as she rips the belt away from her chest and scoots to the edge of her seat.

“Ben, what is this?” She looks desperately at him, and then back at the men, men she doesn’t recognize, who have divided up and are starting to approach the car from both sides, descending on them like vultures.

Ben doesn’t look at her, keeping his head down, staring at the steering wheel, and her eyes dart urgently between him and the men who are only getting closer

“Ben, what’s going on?” she cries. She reaches across the center console to grab him by the shoulder, shaking him. “Please, please just tell me!”

Taylor_ screams_ when her door is wrenched open, and she tries to hold onto Ben even as she is viciously ripped out, dragged into the gravel, one meaty forearm locked around her throat, the other around her waist, trapping her arms against her sides as she kicks her legs and desperately twists to get free.

“Ben—_Ben_!” she screams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song Taylor is dancing to in the chapter when she realizes the Joker is watching is ‘Always Something There to Remind Me’ by the Naked Eyes. She’s a hopeless 80’s girl, what can I say?
> 
> ‘Where she could live inside of him like a second pulse’: credit where credit is due, this line was inspired by the beautiful Marilyn Hacker quote, “You were inside me like my pulse.” It’s one of the most poignant things I’ve ever read, and I wanted to put my own spin on it and pay homage to it here. 
> 
> ‘Metanoia’ refers to a change in one’s way of life resulting from penitence or spiritual conversion. I’m fascinated by the idea of Taylor thinking she’s been “born again” now that she’s been claimed by the Joker in a very physical way. This has happened once already, in JK, when he branded her, and I think she would feel this “spiritual conversion” tenfold now that he’s broken through this second physical barrier and put his hands inside her.
> 
> Thank you all so much for your incredible feedback so far. I’m still working through responding to all of your reviews for the previous chapter(s), but your enthusiasm for this story always renders me speechless. It’s also been incredibly humbling, the amount of you who have come forward personally to say how cathartic this journey has been for so many of you (as it has been for me, too) especially for those who have suffered through similar traumas/life experiences as Taylor, or those of you who simply identify with her and have found common ground with her. It really means a lot to me that you would share that with me. Thank you for reading. 


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